Talking?

I don’t know about you, but one of the hardest things I found was talking about the way I was feeling and the effect this had on me.

Although I really felt that I didn’t want to talk about anything to do with the cause and ensuing problems I was experiencing, I also felt as though I wanted to let it all out so that everything would go away and life could return to ‘normal’.

This is one dilemma it took many years to approach and is still very much a ‘work in progress’.
I found I was afraid of talking about anything for fear of totally breaking down and ‘going mad’. Perhaps I was afraid that any approach to the subject of my feelings may result in me going to a place that I may never return from. Yet all this ‘stuff’, these illogical and frustrating feelings were there inside me with nowhere to go.

So what do we do? It is not an easy task to truly relay how one feels to those around us. In addition to the feelings associated with PTSD, perhaps there are other feelings about the people around us and their expectations of us. Can we really approach them with stuff that disturbs us? Can we expect anyone to understand how disturbing talking about these things is? Do we feel guilty about ‘offloading’ on to those close to us? What is the point – there is nothing they can do. Or at least that was my perception of things.

Even now (many years later) no one close to me knows the whole story or has the whole picture of ‘me’. Different people in my life have ‘snippets’ of information. Perhaps that is down to me not really wanting to approach my difficulties with anyone close, or perhaps it is because I have not been able to relay the ‘whole story’ to anyone.
I thought ‘no one can understand this thing’, ‘no one can understand the turmoil inside me’, ‘I am alone – what can I do’. These feelings still persist today to a lesser extent. What has changed is my perception of the understanding of others and knowing why I find it so difficult to talk about these things.

Relaying one’s deepest (and perhaps darkest) feelings to anyone else is difficult. Even in the best of relationships, each person has their own perception of the world and their own feelings – none of us can ever truly understand what others are feeling.

So looking at our situation, it is going to be difficult to find people who truly understand what we are going through daily. Although there are many good therapists and counsellors who are able to help us explore the causes of our PTSD, there are few who can really say they understand our experience of daily living.

I found that approaching anything concerned with my feelings took a long time. Part of the problem I had was trusting anyone with something so deep, personal, and (to me) illogical and frustrating. I found myself only trusting some people with some information.

So who do you talk to? Perhaps more to the point is who can you talk to?

This is something that took me a long time(12 years) to find out. Eventually I went to my GP who referred me to the attached community psychiatric nurse. I was lucky. She listened as I blurted out some random stuff – trying to condense my feelings in to a few seconds – eventually breaking down in to a sobbing mess.  Partly with relief at being able to just blurt stuff out and partly through allowing some of the emotions I had spent years trying to control flow from me unrestrained. This is probably the hardest step I have ever had to take in this whole PTSD thing.

I had taken the first step – the most important step in getting this thing inside me to stop having such a devastating effect on my life.

From then on in, I have talked to nurses, my GP and therapists about my feelings and experiences. The important thing for me was finding someone who didn’t know me, would just listen sometimes, would put things in perspective when it was needed and who would not recoil as I relayed disturbing memories and thoughts from deep in my mind.

I have talked about my darkest thoughts, dreams and feelings to someone who is (in effect) a stranger, but someone I knew would listen, would keep things confidential and would not judge me.

The process from there on has been a bit ‘hit and miss’. Sometimes I have been able to talk a lot about things that happened and the way I feel, other times I have not wanted to talk about them at all. But I still don’t expect anyone to fully understand how hard this thing that we live with is.

Where you find someone to talk to will depend on your circumstances. Talking about something as complex as living with PTSD takes time. It took me over a year before I could approach many of the things that affected me.

It is worth it. At the very least, it has enabled me to take back some control and try to keep a reasonable perspective on things.