The Healing Power of a Good Cry

Yesterday, I was trying to explain how I was attacked in college.  The question I was asked was, "how many men and what was their race?"

I went into shock and started crying hysterically.  I just could not engage in such a conversation.  I was sick and tired of talking about what happened to me like it was just a news broadcast talking about the weather or some other innocuous dispassionate topic.

I explain what happens to me and all I get is compete indifference.  One of the reasons I have blocked out memories is because the indifference is probably more painful than anything else.  It is bad enough these things happened.  However, the attitude that what happened to me is just another event with such indifference creates a blinding level of emotional hell that I would not wish on my worst enemy.

I didn't answer the stupid question being asked of me.  I simply just started crying non-stop hysterically for about an hour or so.  Maybe longer or shorter, I don't know.  All I know is the tears were flowing and I couldn't stop it.

At some point, something kicks in my brain that there is no answer or solution for any of this and I just have to simply shut it out of my mind and get on with my life.  However, the human mind mapping from this trauma on my brain remains there.

That being said, at least some acknowledgement that something actually happened to me is better than saying nothing happened at all.  

Acknowledgement of the event to prompt a good cry is healthy.  Crying is the body's natural way of eliminating toxins and bad energies.  I found after a healthy cry that I felt better.

We live in a society that condemns expression of emotions like crying.  I don't know why it is like that.  It is not healthy to hold things inside.  Crying is a way to get all the bad stuff out of your system.  If we don't get emotions out of our system in a healthy way through expressions like crying, then they will come out in an unhealthy toxic way, which is not good for anyone.  

That being said, I found it has been difficult for me to have any of the emotions that result from what happened to me because nobody wants to hear about it at all.  The most I can do for expression is an anonymous blog like this one here, and even then, I have a great deal of difficulty expressing myself here, even when I know that there is zero chance of revictimization or guilt or shame that comes from people shutting me up or shutting me out.

I have lived alone and worked alone for several years now.  I simply have no interest or desire to bother with anybody.  People want to dump their issues on me but are oblivious to my issues.  That gets tiring after awhile.  It feels like a one-way street.  

At some point, I decided to just forget about myself altogether and focus on everybody and everything else that has nothing to do with the traumas of my past.  However, even that gets tiring.  I feel like I have a boulder I have been carrying around on my shoulders for 35 years.  Why do we live in a society that promotes crimes against women and children?  How did this happen?  Why do we blame women  for "getting raped" instead of holding men accounting for committing rape?  That is the problem. 

That's all for now.  More later.

The Pain Gets Worse......

There are days when I feel like this blog doesn't make the pain better, even though that is the point of why I started it in the first place.  Sometimes, I feel like it makes the pain worse.

Honestly, I don't think the rapes or the beatings are nearly as bad as dealing with the emotional pain of how people react to what happened to me.  I think the most painful emotions happen when I am met with complete indifference to what has happened to me.  If I try to explain that I was raped or I was beaten, I get a response of indifference like I just said I went to the store or I just watered my plants.  If I don't get indifference, then the other reaction will be that either I deserved it, or, that I'm just being a drama queen looking for attention - that I'm exaggerating - or that I'm just outright lying.

The worst part is that sometimes I think that not only is there indifference to what I say happened to me, I feel like I'm not supposed to even talk about it.  Forget about emotions.  I can't be angry, or hurt, or cry, or scream, or yell, or express anything about what happened at all.  How can I even get to emotions when I can't even talk about it.  I mean, even now, I can't even bring myself to write about what happened to me in my own anonymous blog.  I've written some things, but not everything, because the emotional pain is so unbearable it's too much for me.  Just the events are painful enough, but I can't get past the social barriers of rejection and finger-pointing and blame game.  It's horrible.  Even now, just talking about the subject of talking about what happened, without even getting to what happened, is creating alot of emotional hell for me.

What is also frustrating is that the car accident is on the inside.  If someone breaks a leg, or an arm, or has some physical disfigurement on the outside that people can see, then the reaction of horror and anger and sympathy comes from others because it is tangible.  They can see it.  Even if its a biological virus on the inside, still, its tangible with science.  But, when someone like me is talking about emotional pain, it just doesn't get the same response, or reaction, at all.

I can explain a broken leg, or a broken arm, but how do I explain a broken soul.  How do I explain a broken mind.  How do I explain a permanent hell that exists in me that no matter how much I pray, or meditate, or focus on other things, to wipe that hell away, it never goes away.  It's always there.  The most I am able to do is to just get the volume down to level 1 or 2 instead of level 9 or 10.

Once in a great while, and I mean ONCE in a GREAT WHILE, as in VERY RARELY, I have had a break from that hell and had moments of normalcy recently.  They are very few, and very fleeting.  They don't stay, but, it is nice that at least, I can see them.  So, that gives me hope.

I remember those moments of internal normalcy with such vividness.  Nothing special was going on, but I can remember I was standing in my living room and it was there, and it was so nice.  It would be good if I could somehow repair myself 100% to be at that place all the time.  I don't know if I will get there.  I keep trying, and I don't give up.

Tony Robbins Cured my PTSD (Really? Yes Really...)

Does that heading look totally crazy?  Before I experienced the breakthrough that cured my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), I would have said the same thing.  I will explain to you how the cure happened, but first, I need to explain the background of my condition.  If you have PTSD, then this probably will look familiar to you.

After 27 years of going to therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, in and out of psychiatric hospitals, on and off of psychiatric medications, and still no relief, it seemed like PTSD was the unwanted roommate that moved into my soul and was here to stay forever. 

   

I had a psychiatrist describe me as a "mismatch". What he read in my file suggested that I should not be even coherent enough to walk or talk or do anything, let along have a job or work.  I should be drugged up on medications in a psych ward somewhere on disability unable to function.  

I had a counselor tell me that my condition of PTSD was so severe it had a 96% suicide rate and therefore, if I was waking up alive and breathing and I did not kill myself that day, then it was a good day.  That was the most that I could hope for with my condition.

I was also told by psychiatrists and counselors that I could never be 100% better. I was told that I would go through the stages of grief - denial, acknowledgement, anger, sadness, acceptance. The best I could hope for was acceptance, but that would be as good as it gets.The idea that I could actually be 100% better and whole again was an idea I should not waste my time on considering.

For the past 27 years, I would wake up and feel like there was a giant boulder in my chest that I had to push uphill. That was a good day.  Other days I'd have triggers and flashbacks with adrenaline going 1000 mph through my system with blinding emotional pain that would paralyze me to the point that I couldn't function.  I didn't understand why this was as good as it gets and I had to just accept it.

Up until recently, before I learned about Tony Robbins methods, I operated on sheer will power, drive, and prayer.  But it was always like pushing a boulder uphill. I would tell myself to be a warrior and fight the internal currents and plow through anyways.  This was very helpful to a point.  The sheer determination and stubborn refusal to give up or give in to these PTSD emotions at least got me ahead of the curve to be able to function to a certain point.

This was not without any consequences, however.  I still had moments where the will to keep going just wasn't there and I couldn't muster it up no matter how hard I tried and in 2008, I tried to commit suicide but I had a friend who was there and he stopped me from doing it.  He shipped me to a psychiatric hospital and they treated me, for which I was grateful.  That was probably my lowest point.  Then I went through counseling and psychiatric meds and all of that was helpful too.  The meds helped me to get a glimpse of what normal felt like, and the counseling at least acknowledged my extreme emotional pain and suffering, so that was helpful also. 

I then had good days and bad days and I kept the good fight going but ultimately, it was still always there and always something I had to negotiate with every waking minute of my life, but the good news was that it had gone from almost killing me to a lower volume level of being an annoyance, like a dull pain that never goes away but I just got used to it.  I think that was the "acceptance" phase I had been told about by the counselors.

So every day I was always looking for ways to get better.  I still had hope that somehow I was fixable.  It was well known that some people had PTSD, but others who were exposed to similar traumatic events didn't develop PTSD at all.  So, what was going on there?  If it really was all scientific and final, then PTSD should develop in everyone who gets an exposure to trauma, not just some and not others.  That fact alone told me that there was something I was missing.  Something I needed to figure out to be free of PTSD and not have it come back, just like the people who had exposure to traumas and never developed PTSD.  What were they thinking or doing that I wasn't?

One day I was watching a Tony Robbins video discussing how to change one's emotional state.  I was fascinated with the idea that I could change my emotional state with my control by my rules.  That is the frustration with PTSD.  It feels like it just comes up whenever it wants and I have to battle it all the time.  

In the video, Tony Robbins explains that you can change your emotional state by doing two things.  First, motion changes emotion.  In other words, get up and move around, walk around, exercise, run, do something to move your body.  When you move your body, think about how you move when you are confident and you have had a great victory and you're on top of the world.  Move like you're in that emotional state.  When you move like you're happy and enthusiastic and on top of the world and victorious and confident, the emotional state comes with the body movements.  I tried this and I found it to be true.  It did work and helped me to feel alot better.

Second, and this is where the big breakthrough happened for me, is changing your core story.  Core story?  What is that?  Well, Tony Robbins explains that everybody has a story that they are running on that controls everything the person is thinking and feeling.  So, if you can figure out your core story then you can rewrite your core story and change your emotional state.

It sounded so trite and silly.  It can't be that simple.  But I was willing to try anything to not feel this way anymore, so I tried it.

I wrote my old core story.  And then I wrote my new core story.  When I did that, I got my breakthrough.  The PTSD storm was gone.  100% gone.  I couldn't believe it.  I had not felt like me with zero PTSD in over 27 years!  I had forgotten what "me" felt like,  And I had all of this energy!! So much energy I didn't know what to do with it!!! IT WAS INCREDIBLE!  

So, I want everybody who is suffering with PTSD to know that there is hope.  Tony Robbins has all the tools you can imagine to help change your emotional state and free you of the grip of your core story that is causing all of your symptoms.  I know its hard to believe, but it can't hurt to try.