Tag: posttraumatic relationship (stress) disorder

• “…all obstacles in my way.”

  For some reason I need to write about this Posttraumatic Relationship (Stress) Disorder, where we are backwards, and how we have the psychic blindness.

   

  Do you get the ramifications of that? 

   

  In my case of this psychic blindness, the mind was blind, but my body knew.  My body had the correct feelings.

   

  This is very intriguing and maddening all at the same time.

   

  To understand that the mind/brain can do this switch, it can take fear and abuse and hide it, that it can literally keep you from knowing that, enrages me at times. 

   

  I almost feel a victim of my mind more than my father.

   

  Do you realize that my mind blocked it out? MY mind refused to accept what was happening, was traumatized by the event, so it didn’t record it.

   

  I am not sure if and when that recording will resurface, will it be like the emotions that just pop up out of nowhere and engulf you in grief?

   

  Due to the fact that my mind was blind, I was able to be with these people, feel uncomfortable but not know why.

   

  I always felt that I had a problem, that here they were just being themselves and I wanted them to be different.

   

  Wanting them to be different?  I guess my body knew they were different than what appeared.  I was always not satisfied, always expected and needed more from them, maybe all I needed was more from my mind.

   

  It feels like my mind cheated on me, betrayed me, and hung me out to dry! 

   

  The one act, the one huge moment that it should have recorded all of it, it shut its eye.

   

  Would it matter today if I had the picture, if I knew for certain what it covered up, or have I already made the movements I need to be at peace?

   

  This psychic blindness hurt me much more than my father for it allowed me to continue being around him, to bring my children to him.

   

  My mother and I had the same blindness and I was her biggest champion, I tried to make the outside fit her mental mind, I worked hard to create the family life for her while we were both blind to who our father was.

   

  The ramifications of that blows your mind!  Do you think that this psychic blindness is the subconscious mind?

   

  Is the blindness hidden in our subconsicouness, for otherwise wouldn’t we know we were blind.

   

  It seems like it was hidden out of sight of our normal knowing.

   

  Otherwise wouldn’t it be like pretending it didn’t happen.

   

  What is denial and what is pretend and what is psychic blindness in comparison?

   DENIAL – noun: an assertion that something said, believed, alleged, etc, is false: despite his denials, we refuse to believe a doctrine, a theory or the like.

   

  PRETEND verb: fake, falsify. Synonyms: act affect allege assume , be deceitful, be … verb: play the part of. Synonyms: act , assume the role, imagine imitate

   

  PSYCHIC BLINDNESS –forms of nervous disease in which, while the senses of sight and hearing remain unimpaired, the mind fails to appreciate the significance of the sounds heard or the images seen.

   

  FAILS TO APPRECIATE! 

   

  I did not really think, as usual, that there really was or would be a meaning to the term ‘psychic blindness’.

   

  I knew it was like being blind, or selective hearing and sight!

  But damn the things it ‘fails to appreciate’ my God!

   

  It horrifies me the significance of this nervous disease!

   

  Hell, no wonder we are nervous, no wonder my body was in angst, no wonder I considered myself mental, my mind failed to appreciate the sights and sounds of abuse, of rape of being molested!

   

  Failed to appreciate.  How kind of a definition is that?!

   

  No need to deny or pretend, for we failed to appreciate what it was we saw or heard.

  What appears to be conscious denial is really psychic blindness.

   

  I often stated that my family was walking around plugging their ears, closing their eyes and humming really loud to not hear and see what hit the papers and the courtroom that winter of 2001.

   

  For me to see that paper and have my father sitting there in court, now labeled a “Sexual Predator” and then to read my mother’s account of him being a good man, that he clothed and fed 14 children, that is psychic blindness at play.

   

  To see a brother stand in the court of the land and release back into society a man who molested his daughter, that is psychic blindness at play.

   

  When my sisters called and wrote to me about my horridness, of turning against their father, of not seeing the good in him, that he was doing the best he can, that love is not conditional, that is psychic blindness in living color.

   

  They failed to appreciate what they saw and heard!

   

  Oh my, will that stay with me today.

   

  The working mechanism of this disorder, the culprit is  “psychic blindness,’ it is the cancerous cell, the root cause of our disorder!

   

  What this does to a person, is that we are incapable of seeing or hearing bad things about the very person who molested us, we become faithful to the enemy, we then fight like hell against those who are trying to help us.

   

  We have our sides all wrong, we support those who we shouldn’t and shun and run from those who want and can save us.

   

  I see how it works in my family alone.  My mother and I, our last conversations spoke of the differences of our perceptions, boy is that true.  She is still locked into the psychic blindness and now I see.

   

  I remembering feeling like I could see too much, yet it was so long overdue.

   

  It overwhelmed me, to hear and see all that things that this disease had denied me for so long.

   

  “I can see clearly now the pain is gone, all obstacles in my way!”

   

  September 1, 2009

  no self awareness, no self esteem, posttraumatic relationship (stress) disorder, psychic blindness

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• Gratitude of You.

  Imagine if you will, two people with Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder, meeting the opposite person they were usually drawn to, yet forming a bond.

   

  If you understand the disorder, we are drawn to people who are not good to us, and can’t seem to be with people who are.

   

  My brother and I, even though we were raised in the same house, he and I didn’t share much common ground.  He went his way at eighteen and I went mine.

   

  Both victims of childhood abuse, we left home with our Disorder firmly in place and set out into the world fully packed for more abuse.

   

  While he left home and got as far away from our family, its religion, the rules and beliefs of our parents, I settled in and set up a home life much similar to my parents, minus the pedophile.

   

  We didn’t interact much with each other over the years, there wasn’t animosity, but nor was there a deep friendship either.  We were two grown kids doing the best we could, coming from whence we came.

   

  Somehow about 7 years ago, we began talking on the phone.  It was sporadic in the beginning yet an odd but interesting exchange always happened.  We began to explore and to seek a new and better God.  We met again for the first time.

   

  Shortly there after, he introduced me to yoga a well as new and exciting authors, and so began this most unusual relationship for us, the opposite of what our ‘disorder’ usually sought. 

   

  I now believe it was that fact alone that helped us the most.  I wasn’t his normal cup of tea if you will, nor was he mine, yet by our seeing the ‘other-side’ we were able to see where we stood.

   

  This may be hard to follow, but in my mind it is a clear as day.

   

  Up and until the time we re-connected we had no one to show us where we were wrong due to our Posttraumatic Relationship disorder!

   

  If you have a relationship disorder, you never really get to experience a ‘healthy’ relationship because the disorder won’t allow you to get there!

   

  It is simply amazing to me that we stuck it out, well it wasn’t always easy, we did go for months of silence, and had moments of major disagreements, but one thing always remained in the midst of us in the past 4 ½, Reality.

   

  Here we were two grown adult with this disorder or the affects of the disorder, learning to create or do a real relationship, the blind leading the blind.

   

  Except that I could see what he couldn’t see and he could see what I couldn’t see, so we were the perfect pair!

   

  I could see where his mind was confused and he understood perfectly where I had missed the mark.  We both needed the other to make sense of where we were, and even to where we stood today.

  Because of our similar childhoods with sexual abuse we were able to understand the unthinkable, to acknowledge the inner trauma and how it affects the body and mind.

   

  Where my mind was closed, my body was wide open and held the fear, his body was closed but his mind wide open to remember. 

   

  I was continually amazed at our sameness, but the differences we carried.  He remembered all, but his body was numb, my mind forgot all, but my body seemed to hold the memory alive.

   

  As far back as I can remember my mind and body were at odds, I would not be alone with my father, yet I couldn’t tell you why. 

   

  On December 4^th 2004, I had the answer to a puzzle of 46 years, I made sense, the full disclosure of my life came tumbling out, and with it the aftershocks that left me standing in a pile of rubbish that was my life.

   

  The after affects were the knowing that I was with people who hurt me and couldn’t be with people who didn’t, that my whole system seemed to working backwards and upside down.

   

  The disorder had made such a mess of my world, I had a lot of relationships to rework or let go of, and in the midst of that my brother and I were both affected personally as well as a unit. 

   

  Our new relationship was going to be tried over and over and each time we were forging new boundaries and learning how to be with someone in a new way.

   

  He taught me and I taught him, together we stood true to ourselves and our inner truths, we challenged our minds and sought to reclaim a new reality, we shared books and new authors, to the millions of insights that would startle us and have us sitting back in our chairs, the volumes of ways we had it so wrong.

   

  It wasn’t a teacher and a student relationship although it was, we just kept changing chairs, sometimes I was being taught and others I was the teacher, it never seemed to matter which, if it was our time to be the student we welcomed the others great wisdom, and when it was our time to lead, we did so with the greatest respect.

   

  He thanks me in his blog, “Sister of Kindness” and I was beginning this blog at the same time.  Yet in it’s place came the blog about the Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder.

   

  I began a blog and was trying to share how we were the same but the opposites, how we connected in the most unlikely way, and how it was that we carried each other to the finish line while running the same race, and it seemed nearly impossible to write, but now I can see that I had to first read about the Disorder in Dr. Mona Lisa’s book, who we were and why.

   

  I didn’t have such a fancy name for our dysfunction, but I knew intuitively that we were the perfect opposites to make our way through.

   

  We have literally shared millions of hours on the phone, each in our own personal hell, sorting and labeling, tossing out and lamenting at each new loss, elated with each new freedom and fragment of self we discovered.

   

  If you can picture two lost souls buried under a mountain of rubbish, weakened and in total confusion, working in starts and stops to become free to stand tall and walk alone towards brighter future, that is who we are!

   

  The mountain of stuff we had to sort out whether it be in the reality of now or in the messed up past or in the vaults buried deep and out of sight in our minds, we have traveled great distances to get where we are today, and greatest feat is to figure out the messes of the mind.

   

  How do you do that?  How do you even begin to begin to begin sorting when you don’t even know that what is in your head is wrong?

   

  Our messes were created or began by little children, left alone in our minds without adult supervision, so we created and labeled and sorted out things as a child would, but then called it our truth.

   

  That inner truth was a beacon that led us down roads most would fear to go, in places and with people that were as messed up as ourselves.

   

  It is indeed amazing that you become color blind to the fact that you are both a mess. There is no one healthy person to compare your self too, no bright light of normal.

   

  Normal too is a fallacy for what is normal?  I have always said I went in search of normal but way overshot the mark.

   

  I am not normal in the general definition, but I am way normal for me.

   

  I am normal to me and my brother is normal to me, coming from the road we have been on, we are perfectly normal.

   

  We are the perfect example of two souls caught up in the disorder and the perfect pair to tag team and to work ourselves free.

   

  What a journey my brother and I have been on, one that required the fearless, a seeker of the truth no matter how shocking it was.

   

  We stood bravely and with courage without any idea what we stood against.  We were walking into a mad mad mind!

   

  A journey with my brother, wow what a road we have been on.  Thank you brother for being there, for being you and for walking the path you had to walk, because of it I can see.

   

  When you think that all your pain and suffering was for naught, it wasn’t, it was all for me.

   

  There is no word big enough, just Gratitude of you.

   

   

  August 31, 2009

  awakening to dysfunction, brother’s journey, posttraumatic relationship (stress) disorder, walking free of dysfunctional family.

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• The New Feminine Brain.

  “The New Feminine Brain” by Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D.

   

  Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder;

   

  Childhood sexual abuse, incest, or adolescent rape can rewire the brain circuits for love, bonding, trust, and intimacy, so that women tend to love, bond to, trust, and be intimate with people they should in fact fear, people who resemble the perpetrator of their trauma.  And they tend to FEAR those they could LOVE, those whom they could actually have a trusting, secure, healing relationship.  In effect, with PTRD, the fear and the love circuits get crossed.

   

  The same can happen with monkeys that have had both amygdalas removed, a key temporal lobe area that is important for encoding and detecting fear, anxiety and intuition.  When monkeys have had a bilateral amygdalectomy, they lose the capacity to feel fear in frightening situations.  The monkeys run and hug laboratory workers in white coats – people they should be frightened of.  They also try to have sex with inappropriate partners.  These monkeys, called Kluver-Bucy monkeys, are said to have psychic blindness, a numbness.  Their fear and love emotional circuits have switched.  They lose the capacity to make correct choices even though all the indicators are clearly in front of them, right before their very eyes.

   

  Posttraumatic relationship disorder alters the amygdalas and the other brain areas so that women tend to have ‘psychic blindness’ to dangerous situations, especially relationships.

   

  Prostitutes are more likely to have survived childhood sexual abuse.  Rape victims are more likely to be raped again.  Women who have experienced physical abuse as a child are more likely to be in a physically abusive relationship as adults.  Pain and stress are more likely to be recorded in body memory by the temporal lobe’s amygdala, where it evokes physical health reactions, like digestive complaints and heart palpitations.  The hippocampus, the memory system that puts fear into words and creates conscious though, is less apt to lay down traumatic memories.  When a woman has had a life-defining, emotionally traumatizing experience, the frontal lobe-hippocampal circuits are disconnected in a way so she is less likely to talk about it.  She will however, reenact the trauma – not in art or play therapy as a child would – on the biggest playing field: relationships.

   

  Previous traumatic experience is very likely to shape your unconscious behavior, and your personal choice in mates, jobs, and social contacts.  You are less likely to understand why you feel the attraction that you feel, because during traumatic stress, stress neuropeptides norepinephrine and cortisol disconnect the left-brain “talk” memory systems, but simultaneously turn up the volume on the right-brain “action” memory system.  Your brain and body are primed emotionally to return to the relationship “scene of the crime” and react and reenact that past traumatic relationship over and over.

   

  Baby mice who are raised in a locked box where they are repeatedly shocked tend to return to that box when set free as adults.  Despite the genetic differences between a woman and a mouse, unfortunately, we do tend to act similarly when it comes to trauma.

   

  Previous traumatic experience preheats and warms up the brain pathways, increasing your chances of having the same type of relationship again and again.  Even if you think it through, and say to yourself, “I am never going to fall into that trap again,” you may be pulled back toward it like a moth to a flame.  Your frontal-lobe reasoning circuits murmur, “think this through. You don’t want to go through all that pain, do you?” But your temporal-lobe amygdala, body memory circuits scream louder.  What would you more likely hear?

  “He’s so exciting.”

  “She really just understands me.”

  “Being in his arms feels like I’ve come home again.”

  “I feel like we’ve known each other for years and years, even though we just met.”

   

  The greater the trauma, the more inescapably stressful it seems, the longer it lasts, and the greater its intensity, the more likely the feminine brain-body circuits will be shaped into creating a chain of relationships that mimic the trauma.  Unlike the male combat veteran who has flashbacks, visual memories of the trauma, a woman will replay the memory over and over again in the cinema of her life until she gets the proper help to stop the pattern.  Alone, she can’t prevent herself from being attracted to reenacting the trauma anymore than an alcoholic can stop drinking by himself without proper treatment.

   

  Each time she chooses the “loser,” the “creep,” that “bum,” whatever “prototype” can play the part of the perpetrator, the deeper the pattern gets engraved in the memory network of her brain and body.

   

  In fact, the brain’s visual and attentional pathways that could actually direct her to healthier mates fall into disuse.  Abused women are attracted to the same people who mistreat them because their brains become molded in such a way that’s the only kind of person they tend to notice.  The nicer, normal men and women don’t seem ever to make it on the screen of relationship radar.

  Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder is a long name for what I believe I had or have. 

   

  Just knowing there is an actual word or words to describe me is an awesome thing.

   

  What I recall saying is that it was like changing the DNA of who I was, to undo and step away from habits that seemed were there for generations.

   

  The psychic blindness is my mother to a Tee, and me of course.

   

  I am half way through this book, which has a subtitle, “How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius and Intuition.”

   

  I would highly recommend this book for any woman who is not totally balanced in mind and body.  It may be interesting for you to see why!

  August 30, 2009

  awaking to dysfunction, healing childhood wounds, posttraumatic relationship (stress) disorder, understanding painful memories

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