Writing My Way Through Complex PTSD

Just a Reminder

2012-02-13T18:37:00.000-08:00

Hello old and new friends! I appreciate the follows! I just wanted to remind you all that I have moved here and I would greatly appreciate it if you continued to follow me at "Writing My Way Thru PTSD" over at Wordpress. Thanks again!!! Take care!!
Amy
http://ptsdcreativewriting.wordpress.com

Secret Song by Blue October "It's Just Me" :(

2011-08-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

Warning: I'm Going to Be Moving to Wordpress

2011-07-31T11:23:00.000-07:00

I want all my followers to know that I'll soon be fully moved into my new blog (same content as here, just transfering) at Wordpress. The address is http://ptsdcreativewriting.wordpress.com/ Feel free to come check it out it looks so much better than this one. Please start commenting over there if you're going to. Thanks!
Amy

A Good Song and Blog Carnival is Up

2011-07-31T05:40:00.000-07:00

First, check out Adam Hood's "Million Miles"

Great song. July's Mental Health Blog Carnival is up over at Behind the Facade. Astrid did a great job. It's a collection of great mental health/illness blog posts and the theme of the month is Stigma and Discrimination.

BPD? C-PTSD?

2011-07-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

I never quite know who I am. When I have a long enough stretch of time where I’m in my own skin (my own mind), I feel like I have more room inside to breathe. I think ‘So this is me. This is who I am. Ok, then, let’s go.’ And then, some Tuesday, DPD (Depersonalization Disorder) opens its mouth and I fall silent in the chaos of that vacuum. I’ve lost me again. No reasoning or science or soul-searching or writing. I am disabled from the pen and so I know it must be real. Just my physical stillness and internal cavity that is crying–the cry that offers no relief, but more panic. I see all my thoughts in a speeding parade of sentences that pour from the mouth. Mine doesn’t move or quiver. I can’t feel anything but this aching tiredness and piercing terror. All thoughts without emotions, all memories without any attachment–my skin is loose and thin. I don’t speak at these times because I don’t know the girl that will form the words. She’ll talk in short replies in a voice I don’t know. This isn’t me. And I’m slipping. Everything is false–the world around me–merely particles of matter that aren’t there–they’re mirages. They’ll dissolve away, and leave me here, alone, to madness. I may not return. …Three days later, or sometimes just three hours later, it’s over. I made it. I’m tight in my flesh and the bedsheets are cool beneath my fingers. Okay. Round 967 over. Get up.

So Latuda

2011-07-28T11:45:00.001-07:00

So I'm a little leery but I'm going to give it a go--I'm finally going (slowly) off Abilify and onto Latuda, a sort of new med out there that is an antipsychotic (namely for schizophrenia but I guess bipolar as well). I'm assuming it will help with my auditory hallucinations and what-have-you, along with some of the PTSD symptoms. Still think I fit Borderline to a tee. Anyone out there on Latuda or know anything about it? Please share!
I really gotta stop using seroquel as a crutch. It needs to go.

copyright2011AmyJoSprague

Small Parts

2011-07-23T15:40:00.001-07:00

I think it might be in the little words
encoded in all my diaries somewhere
I think if I could just focus
I'd find the pieces in the pages
to my narrative that has
no page numbers

There is no order to the pages
or the feelings in them
I read fragments, small parts,
of a broken story
except for one common thread
in all the pieces--
the constant reaching
for a self.

copyright2011AmySprague

The Circles & Cycles

2011-07-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

I suppose I'll tell you now, this is more like a journal entry, a rant, a musing, a questioning...I'm seeking things and trying to find it this way...we'll see

So I'm constantly trying to figure it out--the IT being what happened and what's happening and a little bit of what will happen. The problem, what makes it so damn hard to write, is I think it must either be the bipolar disorder or the dissociation that has me chasing my f'n tail. I'm trying so hard to always to gage myself and what I do and say and feel, I'm my own worse critic and judge, because I want to know if I'm getting out of this PTSD shit. Am I evolving, or only involving excess? I have times where I dive into the emotions and the ambiguous feelings and the actions and reactions I have (not digging into the past but into the present). I swim around in it and really get pretty far with discovering patterns and behaviors, progress and declines. Then something happens...I space out. I get tired of it. I get so exhausted. And time slips by and I make myself busy (what's a disabled gal to do but beach it and read and study study study and art art art) and its like I wake up and forgot everything I sought, all the answers I was on the brink of have disappeared or seem foolish. I don't know where I am (spiritually, socially, and mentally). Doubt comes like big city shadows across buildings and I'm this little black jerk in the alley. It's only natural that kick my self in the ass for this, for doing it again, for getting so close to something, getting ahead, getting 'somewhere' and then bang, I vanish. I lapse back. Am I subconsciously protecting myself? Or is it mania and lows? Or is it the ADHD's exhaustion and lack of focus after too strong of a focus? Ya know I keep thinking about when I had my animal totems read by White Buffalo Woman, a proud member of the Lakota Tribe. She took me under her wing when I first began to ensue writing as a living because it was my passion. Her sociology class in college drew us close and she took me to do a reading. I have it all written down somewhere it was AMAZING. But i'll never get over this: when it came time to see what my spiritual guide was, (and this was before the temperature in my brain and all the disorders escalated) and at the time I believed I was tough, strong, solid--because I fought against those that abused and abandoned me--so I thought highly of my secretly fractured self. I mean come on Amy--you were burning out on fumes. Anyways, she asked me what I thought my spiritaul guide was and I felt this well of pride in my chest for how far I'd come so I'd said "A Lion." Yes. I f'n said "a lion." Oh to be young and to dream that ego up. We did the cards and what I chose stunned and disgusted me then but is actually soooooo sooooo true to who I am (with the PTSD/trauma). I chose the animal that plays dead in danger: the possum. Hehee that cracks me up now. I'm so possum. I left there broken hearted that day and feeling like an idiot. If I'd only known then how true it was, and that it wasn't so bad. It's not like I play dead to everything (hear I am still trying to make myself feel better about it :)

Maybe I'm forgetting the important thing--to just be. To let myself feel what I feel, be as I am, be in the now, stay present (had lots of practice on that in the bin!) instead of examining everything so closely to prove to myself that I'll be okay. I need to know that I'll be okay and that I'll be prepared if anything backlashes--like the EMDR coming up with a counselor that really doesn't know me that well. I want to be bold and brave like I used to feel but moreso I don't want to be STUPID. Is he the right therapist to do this with? I miss my old psychotherapist. Saw her for ten years. I stopped because it got too personal, too involved, and too much about herself. But now I want her back, the tradeoffs were worth it. Because she KNEW me. She got me through some rough-ass times. Because of her I had no rage and anger issues in the thick of the PTSD--I was looking beyond that for my meaning and my purpose and what I could get out of it. My abuser couldn't have anymore of me, I was hungry for myself. She knew these things. She's brilliant. She's also too personal and opinionated. I don't know what to do.

I'm going back to the Upanishads and Alan Watts. I need to get my feet on something sacred. I need to...regain my fragile lucus of controlf. I see my situation like a fushigi ball, know those things? It's mirrored center ball "doesn't move" it reflects, and there's a clear, thick ball or coat around it that you use to rotate it and make it look like gravitational magic, the centers not moving as you manipulate your hands. Yeah. Info-mercial. My child "had to have it." I kind of play with it. But anyway, (clearly this is a sporadic, moodified journal post and I apologize to all who were looking to read something that contained a point). Anyway, I don't take much stock in the life that is happening around me as of yet (apparently I've stopped "being" that much is clear) because I'm too preoccupied with looking at my reflection. That's it. I've figured out my problem. So what. What do I see in me? Or is it her? Do I still see this woman I'm trying to be as this "her" that I'll someday fill. Filling my hands--I"m constantly trying to fill my hands: I set up boundaries between me and my ex, which was goddamned hard, and I decided to press charges against my abuser. I also am teetering on facing him and getting it from him--the whole truth. But will I get it? Can I stand it? I'm testing my waters so I can move--move somewhere, in some direction.

I picked up my old PTSD workbook, got another book called Trauma and Recovery which is okay, and got The Stranger in the Mirror on my kindle, though I prefer these texts as actual books. And I read at the beach with my daughter or at night and I'm wondering why it feels new to me--these facts? I've already read the hell outa them before. It's like I need proof to know I feel the way I do and live the way I do for a reason. I need facts to show me that my feelings are valid, real, and mine and should be respected. I'm floundering in the respect arena. With my ex, with my sisters, with my mother. My family, they love me, they support me, they've been there for me like nobody's business, yet....I have this lingering ick in my gut that they see me as this sick, disabled woman who is too messed up with ptsd, bipolar moods, adhd, and dissociation and insecurities that she can't tell her own damn way around. that she doesn't know what's best for her, that her opinions and convictions have great purpose and make sense. Why do I feel so disrespected by them lately? Why do I feel like they see me by my labels? I'm still Amy; I'm still hot-headed and quick to defend; I'm learning how to respect myself; I don't judge ANYONE, so why do I feel so judged? It's shunning. It makes me angry. Furious. And I don't know how to tell them "Hey, it's ME for Christ's sake, if you don't take stock in what I say about what I want to do with my life, then fuck the fuck off!" But no, amiable me doesn't want to cause anything, because I deeply doubt myself and think my chemistry is playing tricks on me and that they're right. Good God. I gotta quit writing for now, I'm getting irked. Later.

from "Mutable Earth" by Louise Gluck

2011-07-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

"...So you couldn't protect yourself?

The absolute
erodes; the boundary, the wall
around the self erodes.
If I was waiting I had been
invaded by time.

But do you think you're free?

I think I recognize the patterns of my nature.

Bud do you think you're free?

I had nothing
and I was still changed.
Like a costume, my numbness
was taken away. Then
hunger was added."

--Louise Gluck, from Vita Nova

Carl Adamshick's "The Emptiness" ...excerpts

2011-07-19T09:34:00.001-07:00

"...the forked branch of my existence
was lit like a crack

of lightning.
My breath, my tongue, the broken font

of my voice had wanted to praise.
And when I didn't speak

I became a secret, a testimony
against my own body. I lived
and lived

with the fact that I watched others
struggle and pray.

I watched them lie on the shore
with their heads adrift in a shine if stars

and wanted their hunger
to finally consume their sad,
hurting bodies.

I watched, hoping
when the tide came and lifted them away

I could live without shame.
The emptiness. The tongue bound

to the betrayal held in the mouth,
to the apology held

in the mouth, to the brutal remains
held in the socket of the mouth.

And still, under it all,
I feel an orchid, the cold river flow

around my feet. I see the stars
as the shimmering bones

Of migratory birds
and swallow the humiliating taste

of beauty. I am the dirt,
the worm-dirge, the lament and procession

winding through a garden burning
with flowers.

I am not the body that dies naked,
swollen and torn,

infested with beetles.
I am not the body that lacks

the funeral and its offering of plums.
I am not the body,

the empty midnight station.
I am not the bombed-out factory...

...I am the severed hands of a war

and feel it escape into me like a tired lover

I am comfort into the dark hours,
where my body, swathed with heat

and sorrow, listens to air
pass through the gate of its teeth.

...When light around the field is spilt moon
and memory is a nest

of mud and grass hidden in the bright
summer branches,

when emptiness is an open door,
the well-black pupil of an iris.

I am lost in the living, in the acceptance
of rain filling a bucket,

in the belief
that the chemical burn was a washing

for the exodus
and the smoke rising through
the chimneys

into the pale-blue morning was
a love song.
There are days when I wake

and find my face is a hole
and I have nowhere to hang my
mask."

From "Forecast" by Lynn Melnick (Narrative)

2011-07-18T18:17:00.001-07:00

"...It's your knack for filth

that keeps me begging for
beauty in the rotting soil.
Tell me how I grew from
garbage,

tell me how lethal, how lovely I
am."

--Lynn Melnick

New Memoir on Child Abuse and PTSD

2011-07-18T15:07:00.001-07:00

Just got this today, very excited about it. It's a memoir by Tracy Ross. It's her journey through sexual abuse by her stepfather, PTSD, and finding herself in nature.

Beginning the Memoir

2011-06-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

For the thing which

I greatly feared is come upon me,

and that which I was afraid of

is come unto me,

I was not in safety, neither

had I rest, neither was I quiet;

yet trouble came.

--JOB

(from William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)

I'm finally looking at the memoirs out there on PTSD. I'm not too enthused, aside from Jessica Stern's Denial (what I read of it--it was too triggering at the time). I'm interested in reading Styron, though that seems to be about depression. There's Beyond the Tears: A True Survivor's Story by Lynn C. Tolson (which I know nothing about yet). The Endless Tour: Vietnam, PTSD, and the Spiritual Void by Amy Snow looks kind of interesting. There's, of course, Kay Redfield Jamison's work, but that's a focus on Bipolar madness. There's more of course but they're not quite what I'm looking for. At all. But even Stern's is more scientific, factual, data data data. I'm looking for what I'm trying to write--a memoir, literary obviously, on what it's actually like having complex PTSD (and psychosis, bipolar disorder, dissociative amnesia, depersonalization--ok basically madness). Literary madness. I have a story to tell, only it's not so much a story but fragments, pieces and clues, wholeness and the void--all that I am. I'm teetering on whether I'll be able to do it, whether I should attempt what could go nowhere--aside from the healing that comes from writing, which really, is enough, it's definately somewhere. I'm writing for myself. But I'm also writing for awareness, even though that wasn't my original intention. I couldn't see that far ahead then.

So I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to attempt this. It's tricky. Jessica Stern's memoir is a memoir about PTSD, not the events. Clever. But not my route. It's tricky because of the nature of PTSD and it's other worldly void you're dropped into, and then all the pieces and forgotten memories that come through your body--how the hell do you write that? in some kind of order? that's believable? I have essays and bits and poetry and narratives all over, but the POINT I'm making isn't about the facts, it's about the fiction I live in. This is gonna take a looooonnnggg time.

An All-Too True Quote

2011-06-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

"When we are children we need to find that there are significant others, especially parents, who are able to manage what we are not yet able to manage in ourselves...If our parents are not able to provide this containment, we will probably go in search of this from others. If we do not find the containment we need from others, we are likely to grow up believing that THERE IS SOMETHING IN US THAT MIGHT BE TOO MUCH FOR ANYONE." (Patrick Casement, 2007)

Ptsd is Wars Biggest Killer (Ptsd Awareness)

2011-06-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

This soldier with Combat PTSD blew my mind with his passion and his facts. I'm becoming more and more interested in Combat PTSD...what can I do? How can a girl like me, writing to survive, connect with veterans with PTSD? I'm looking into it, looking into it...

Mark Wills Joins USA Cares for Ptsd Awareness Campaign

2011-06-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to share with you all another song. Especially since it's National PTSD Awareness Day. It's an amazing song. Because this song is different. It's a song for PTSD fighters, about PTSD. It's dedicated to soldiers returning from the war and having PTSD, yet we can all relate to it. It's by country singer Mark Wills who has joined forces with USA Cares in order to raise awareness to the men and women who have served and come home to face PTSD (and TBI). It's called "Crazy Being Home" and it's a campaign dedicated to helping those who have risked their life for our freedom (and suffer for it).
Jessica Dover of Lotos Nile (a music and entertainment marketing firm) came across this blog and wanted to share with us. She hopes you all will enjoy it as much as Details in the Fabric. She says "I am a true believer that music speaks to us in a way that no one else can" and she's right on about that.
I was unable to share the recorded/album version, but you can listen to it here: www.crazybeinghome.com
*also check out Crazy Being Home on Facebook!
Here it is everyone! Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

My Favorite Song, a Must For All PTSD'ers

2011-06-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Spliced Daisies

2011-06-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

You didn't do this to yourself
my sister tells me
and I'm supposed to believe that

supposed to believe another person
can take away what I'll never get back
that permanent damage in my chemistry
is on someone else's hands
when all I see are my own
every day
wringing
when all I feel is the chemicals
shifting and alluding me
all I see are these empty rooms
the birds outside
thinking nothing but flight
flight flight

we are spliced daisies
reaching reaching
multiple petals,
thinnly sliced,
bent toward the ground
always looking up

A Young Soldier...Coming Home by Sue Diaz

2011-06-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

This is a beautiful video sent to me by Sue Diaz. It's about her son's return home after two long deployments in Iraq's Triangle of Death. It's about loss, and then courage, and then...finding your way back home. I've included the William Stafford quote on my blog as well, it is remarkable: "I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. My scars are my shield." Sue's son experienced grave losses and received the Purple Heart. Sue Diaz, a compassionate advocate, is a journalist, Blue Star mom, and leader of writing workshops for veterans. I am honored that she shared this with me and is letting me share it with you.

Orbiting

2011-06-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

I would have preferred a monk
and maybe a lifetime of discipline
over the pace I chose to find some way,
collecting my hospital bracelets
from the bin as if they were
peace treaties to some god.
They say the ego is the last to go;
even the broken ones
seem to think they have something worth
holding onto.
But once mine did I spent a year in a cave,
afraid and starved, trying to fight for that
last little part of me that liked to slip away
and send me off into the air.
The revolutions of seasons finally ended
and I found myself in some kind of light--
somone must've mentioned something
about grace, something about balance: no mind.
I wanted No Mind, that traitor.
And because there was nothing left for me to do
I let go
and it became clear to me that gravity
could be seducing in its standards
and that maybe to fall away
from all that I knew
was really a falling forward--orbiting
past the dropped walls of the earth
looking back to see myself--everyone--as mere
carnations
nothing wild but with complexities harnassed--
tamed; we had grown in our own beds in files
and as I drifted further into the void
I lost fear; I wasn't afraid
to not be such a soft, pink thing
but an exasperation of molecules, a release
from the machinery of my chemistry
that I had made over this
peculiar life; and maybe
once I pass
the fear of losing who I am
or what I was
I can ground myself in a plasma
of the stillness invading my mind
and I'll finally go home
limitless, adrift, passionless,
pain as vague as air.

"The Garment" by Louise Gluck

2011-06-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

LolasRoom @Etsy

The Garment
--louise gluck

My soul dried up.

Like a soul cast into a fire, but not completely,

not to annihilation. Parched,

it continued. Brittle,

not from solitude but from mistrust,

the aftermath of violence.

Spirit, invited to leave the body,

to stand exposed a moment, –

trembling, as before

your presentation to the divine–

spirit lured out of solitude

by the promise of grace,

how will you ever again believe

the love of another being?

My soul withered and shrank.

The body became for it too large a garment.

And when hope was returned to me

it was another hope entirely.

First Memory by Louise Gluck

2011-06-05T00:40:00.001-07:00

First Memory by Louise Gluck

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was--
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

--Louise Gluck

The Poetry of Louise Gluck

2011-05-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

Empty Glass

I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.
A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

O wrong, wrong--it was my nature. I was
hard-hearted, remote. I was
selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

But I was always that person, even in my early childhood.
Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.
I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract
tide of fortune turned
from high to low overnight.

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,
to celestial force? To be safe,
I prayed. I tried to be a better person.
Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror
and matured into moral narcissism
might have become in fact
actual human growth. Myabe
this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,
telling me they understood
the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,
implying (as I once thought) I was a little sick
to give so much for so little.
Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand
intensely)--
a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.

I was not pathetic! I was writ large,
like a queen or a saint.

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.
And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating
impulse
to persuade or seduce

What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate--

What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question
that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,
the Greek ships at the ready, the sea
invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future
lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking
it could be controlled. He should have said
I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

(from The Seven Ages)

Confession

To say I'm without fear--
It wouldn't be true.
I'm afraid of sickness, humiliation.
Like anyone, I have my dreams.
But I've learned to hide them,
to protect myself
from fulfillment: all happiness
attracts the Fates' anger.
They are sisters, savages--
in the end they have
no emotion but envy.

Gretel in Darkness (from The First Four Books of Poems)

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead

are dead. I hear the witch’s cry

break in the moonlight through a sheet

of sugar: God rewards.

Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .

Now, far from women’s arms

and memory of women, in our father’s hut

we sleep, are never hungry.

Why do I not forget?

My father bars the door, bars harm

from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though

you meant to leave,

as though it never happened.

But I killed for you. I see armed firs,

the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.

Am I alone? Spies

hiss in the stillness, Hansel,

we are there still and it is real, real,

that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Mother and Child (from The Seven Ages)

We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.

Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family.

Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.

We dream; we don’t remember.

Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body.

Machine of the mother: white city inside her.

And before that: earth and water.

Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.

And before, cells in a great darkness.

And before that, the veiled world.

This is why you were born: to silence me.

Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn

to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.

I improvised; I never remembered.

Now it’s your turn to be driven;

you’re the one who demands to know:

Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant?

Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us;

it is your turn to address it, to go back asking

what am I for? What am I for?

Snow

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

*****

Decade

What joy touches
the solace of ritual? A void

appears in the life.
A shock so deep, so terrible,
its force
levels the perceived world. You were

a beast at the edge of its cave, only
waking and sleeping. Then
the minute shift; the eye

taken by something.
Spring: the unforeseen
flooding the abyss.

And the life
filling again. And finally
a place
found for everything.

William Stafford...

2011-05-23T21:15:00.001-07:00

"I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. My scars are my shield."

My Girl

2011-05-22T09:20:00.001-07:00