Unlucky.

What an interesting way to describe ten years of someone’s life.

I had never heard of CPTSD.

I had been diagnosed with PTSD, as were my wife and daughter, by separate therapists, but I had never heard any of them mention CPTSD.

My son moved out of state at 19, not for college, the military, or a job; he just left with about three weeks’ notice. He even chose the day before my wife’s birthday, though he postponed it when I brought it up, if only for a few days.

He left most of his belongings, even his car. I drive it now and then just to keep the oil in the engine and the battery charged. To my knowledge, he hasn’t missed a payment since he left. It’s been three years. I text or call him once a week, but he leaves me on read most of the time—for months on end.

Recently, my wife and I started downsizing; our house is too big for just the two of us. When I was cleaning out my son’s room and putting his things in storage, I came across a book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Then I came across another book, The Complex PTSD Workbook, and then another.

He’s the only one of us who hadn’t sought professional counseling over the last ten years of our lives; he wasn’t ready to.

I sat down on his bed and started thumbing through the books. There were underlined and highlighted passages—pieces of paper with notes about how he was feeling on certain days—a journal of loose pages and corner scribblings detailing his emotional health over the year before he moved away.

It is bittersweet to see your child seek the help they need, knowing they need the help.

I know he has been through a lot—we all have.

I was never one for flight

A family of four, each one of us with a form of PTSD. Our family looked so different ten years ago. I loved coming home to them. It was the best part of every day, but life can turn sharp and quick. When it does, it doesn’t right itself easily.

For us, it was a decade we never saw coming.

We did manage to turn it around, but it was never the same, and there were many casualties—time being the biggest one.

I spent so much of that decade in fight-or-fight-harder mode that it nearly cost me everything.

I was so dedicated to supporting everyone else—so dedicated to being the rock that couldn’t afford to break—I missed the cracks forming.

My wife needed me; my daughter needed me. My son needed me—so did work, my mortgage, and groceries.

HR, some executives, and peers at work knew what was happening in our lives. They would sometimes ask, “How are you still going?” I would give a suppressed, half-hearted laugh and say, “The same way you would, if it were you—no choice.”

They told us not to Google it

They knew my son had gone into the hospital one day years ago and didn’t come home for nine weeks. When he finally did, he had lost a third of his body weight, and he was legally blind.

After taking a prescription for an ear infection, the same one he had taken multiple times before, he had a reaction that almost killed him. Toxic epidermal necrolysis, or TEN—the doctors told us not to Google it—they were right.

Over the next four years, my son would go through 40 surgeries and procedures on his eyes. It was like having a newborn again; we would put medicine in his eyes every two hours, every night, for nearly two years. He had both eyes sewn shut at different times and had to have his eyelids reconstructed.

His eyes had become so sensitive to light that he lived in the darkest corners of our home. It’s the reason I tinted all of the windows—so he wouldn’t have to hide in his own home.

At 13 years old, the pain was so bad and so constant that he begged to have his right eye removed. He knew it was an option; the eye doctor had spoken about it.

I couldn’t do it.

If there was the slightest chance his sight could be saved—we needed to try. But I wasn’t the one in pain.

The light was clearly in view

Just as we were nearing the end of our dark tunnel—the light clearly in view—my daughter disclosed that my father had been abusing her over the four years since my son had gone into the hospital.

We spent the next five years in a criminal legal battle attempting to get some semblance of justice for my daughter. She eventually got it, but the fight was hard and long. Lines were drawn, and the only people left on our side of it were my wife, daughter, and son.

Those nine years shaped my children, and they reshaped my wife and me.

Fatigue and microfractures

I remember sitting in the courtroom for sentencing, thinking We made it through; somehow, we made it through.

I know—naïve.

Within a year, in a momentary realization of what my life had become—how far it was from anything I had ever hoped for my family—I would almost make a mistake no one could come back from.

A decade of fighting for my son’s health and eyesight, my daughter’s justice, trying to hold my family and marriage together—through the worst decade of our lives—and a year later, after it was all over, I finally hit the wall.

It’s what engineers call a catastrophic failure—fatigue and microfractures accumulating slowly over years, the very weight of the burden being the same thing that holds a structure together while slowly destroying it. When the burden is finally lifted, the stress removed—everything collapses.

As I sat on my son’s bed, thumbing through his notes and highlights and reading about CPTSD, I realized not all of his notes or observations were about him.

He had been making notes about me.

He was always a really smart kid.

My son has been through more physical and emotional pain than most people three times his age. I imagine that his room, the house he grew up in, even his mother, his sister, and I are all painful reminders of everything he has gone through—everything our family has gone through.

Maybe that’s why they call it complex.

I talk about this often with my wife; she always asks, “What else could we have done?”

She’s right; it’s very hard for people who are drowning to save each other, and we were all drowning.

I just thought we would have time to heal afterward—time to recover as a family. But we all surfaced at different times.

And I guess I am still waiting for my son to surface.

I just left him another message.

God, I miss him.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving: Pete Walker MA, MFT
The Complext PTSD Workbook, Arielle Schwartz, PhD, CCTP-II, E-RYT, EMDR-C