Somehow, after 66 years of living and 30 years of therapy, I had no idea.  It turns out that I suffer from an avalanche of disorders.  I’m good with the PTSD diagnosis; those years of flashbacks don’t lie.  I have SAD without a doubt; every winter I sink into lethargy and gloominess.  Anxiety, well, I didn’t really notice it until a therapist pointed it out a decade ago.  I’m a little fuzzy on what it looks like and how it affects my life, but, hey, I’m game to add it to the list.

Based on what I’ve read, though, I have many more disorders.  For example, I have always sunk into self-loathing whenever a boyfriend dumped me: rejection-sensitive dysphoria.  I also have what a co-worker diplomatically calls a “rich emotional life”–or, in today’s lingo, poor emotional regulation. Plus, there are times when my husband drives me nuts and I check out emotionally for a while: avoidant attachment.  Worst of all, I’ve discovered a diverse panel of internal voices that frequently fight for air-time: dissociative disorder.

I don’t mean to be dismissive.  I‘m fully aware that these labels describe patterns of thought, mood, and behavior that can cause serious distress to those who are burdened with them.

But sometimes I wonder: how do I get up in the morning?

Naming the Inner Parts

It has recently come to my attention that, ahem, I may be more dissociated than I thought.  That my most identifiable inner selves—frightened child, angry teen, nature girl–may be accompanied by others I’ve kept from my own awareness for a long time. For example, one part (trying to keep me safe) wants me to just shut up about the past already; another throws up a smoke shield of fury whenever I’m feeling vulnerable.  There are also parts that come forward at certain stages of my life and then recede the snarky teen, the lusty 20-year-old, the saintly earth mother, the good (e.g., self-sacrificing) daughter.

My therapist says I’m more “fractionated” than most people.  And that is how we’re working together: getting the various parts to meet each other, to negotiate, to extend tolerance and understanding.  But are these really separate “selves” I contain within me, or am I just applying labels to various, normal aspects of my personality?

Maybe it doesn’t matter.  After all, as the therapists argue, any degree of dissociation is a healthy and normal reaction to an intolerable situation.  But I still feel a bit queasy: what does it mean if my internal arrangement really is a bit more, well, dis-ordered than most?

Mental Health:  The Absence of Dis-order?

I can only think of one person who strikes me as having her sh—I mean, life together: I’ll call her Beth.  I worked with her at a home for elderly persons (aka old people) a few decades ago. As a paragon of success, she was not what you might expect. She was plump with curly hair, dressed conservatively in tan khaki pants and a flowered blouse.  The position both of us occupied—activities coordinator—didn’t require a college degree and the paycheck was minimal.  She hadn’t published, posted, blogged, YouTubed, or in any other way made herself stand out. But she laughed easily and often.  She loved the old ladies as she loved everyone: not from a need to rescue them, but out of respect for their inherent wholeness. She saw me that way, too, when I felt like I was falling apart. I was in my 30s and still working part-time, living alone in a studio apartment, and just beginning to have a decade’s worth of flashbacks.

Though everyone brightened in Beth’s presence, I noticed that men especially flocked around her.  It took me a while to understand why.  Once we took a small group of elders to the Como Zoo.  We walked around enjoying the open-air pits that housed a variety of creatures.  Of course, the apes and monkeys were a favorite.  That day, as we watched, one of the orangutans swung close to the edge of the pit, stopped, and stared directly at us.  Suddenly she flared her legs and flashed her–um–private parts.  I was stricken with embarrassment and a fierce wish to pretend nothing had happened, but Jan burst out laughing: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” she shouted.  A few of the old ladies looked pained, a few covered their faces to hide their giggles, and the rest guffawed loudly.  Beth was sex-positive before the term was invented.

Still, even Beth experienced periods of disorder.  At times she pondered leaving her 30-year marriage, but always decided to stick it out: “He isn’t good with feelings,” she explained, ”but he can still make me laugh.”  She also had issues with her teenage son, who was very popular and smart but didn’t want to go to college.  Instead, he wanted to sell cars.  It made her want to rip her hair out: “I just can’t talk to him about it; Dale has to take over,” she told me. They were all in family counseling.

When Labels Help

There’s no doubt that labels can be helpful.  It can be a relief to identify a recognizable pattern of behavior.  In a way it makes you feel more normal: This has been seen before; I’m not the only one; if I can name it, I can change it.   I needed lots of labels to help me through healing: that kind of behavior is abuse, that kind is violent, that is intrusive, that is covert. You have complex PTSD, which is different from regular-old PTSD (now I understand why healing has been longer and harder and doesn’t respond to typical therapies). They are perpetrators, criminals, pedophiles, pornographers, sociopaths.  I was a victim of their reprehensible behavior, and I’m a survivor of it—all their attempts to destroy me failed.

You can ask yourself: Does this label draw my attention to something I haven’t seen before?  Does it help me understand and have compassion for myself or someone else?  Does it help me broker a peaceful co-existence among the disparate parts of myself?

Labels are like tools for home repair: you pick one up when you need it, put it down when you’re done. You get to decide which repairs take priority.  You get to decide whether a particular tool is or isn’t useful for the job.  You get to decide whether you want to keep the tool around for ongoing maintenance or sell it on e-Bay once a job is done for good.

What I Call Myself

The truth is none of us is free of disorder.  We have bloopers in our DNA.  We make dumb decisions.  Have mixed motives.  Put on innocent looks and swear like toddlers that we didn’t dent the car.  Fight over too many peppercorns in the kitcheree (yes, for real).    We bumble and stumble our way around, sure we know what is good and right until we smack into a wall (frequently named “teenager”) that makes it crystal clear we are mistaken.

So most of the time I do not identify myself as mentally ill.  Nor would I say I’m disordered or diseased.  Even the label CPTSD describes only a portion of who I am.  Most of the time I’m a healthy, functioning, whole person working to weather the typical stresses of life.  Yes, I deal with the effects of trauma.  But trauma is a fact of life all over the world: floods, wars, pandemics, malnutrition, captivity, death, illness, displacement.  It makes me feel less alone, I guess, to join the others in that long parade of joy and suffering, to call myself, mostly, human.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Erin R. Burke

I’m a Minneapolis-based writer/editor, blogger, book reviewer, tutor, and former college English instructor–as well as a thriving survivor of childhood abuse.  I’ve been blogging about shifts in identity: from working to retirement, parenting to empty nest, teacher to artist (https://inbetween-selves.blogspot.com/).  I’ve also been blogging through the pandemic and contributed a year-long journal to Women Writing History: A Coronavirus Journaling Project at the National Women’s History Museum.  I’m passionate about writing and other creative practice as a means for sharing life stories, discovering purpose, and healing from trauma.  I live with my husband of 30 years, my 20-year-old son, and my cat Skippyjon!  You can learn more about the services I offer at https://www.tweakedits.com/ .

inbetween-selves.blogspot.com/

At 66, when I look back over my early life, I see the typical manifestations of trauma. I began to “forget” the abuse—dissociate—well before the age of 5. I experienced my first depression at 12. By 14 I had developed an eating disorder, alternating periods of anorexia and bingeing. At 17,          I considered suicide. In college, I would walk for hours to calm anxiety attacks that seemed to come from nowhere. In my early 20s, I fell in love with an alcoholic, a relationship that ended after two and a half exhausting years of anger and mistrust.

After graduating with a master’s degree in ecology from the University of Minnesota, I floundered.
Without the structure of school, I had no idea what to do next. I believed in a future of perpetual
happiness if only I could identify the key to unlock it. For years I agonized about returning to the path
I’d abandoned after college–going to medical school. I toyed with becoming an occupational therapist
or getting a Ph.D. in English. In the meantime I took a series of part-time, short-term jobs, often
interspersed with periods of unemployment. I burned through the money my grandmother had set
aside for me.

At 29, I fell apart. I found myself in a therapist’s office, trembling like a child.

“Can you tell me what’s happening?” the therapist asked gently. She waited for a few seconds, then she looked away. “Do you remember the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz? He needed something to give him courage. Can you wait here a second?”

I nodded. She left and came back with a tiny vial of a clear liquid. “This is a magic potion. Will you try it?”

Somehow, to my smaller self, this made sense. I nodded and took a sip. It worked. I choked out the
image I saw playing out in my mind: my father had thrown me on the bed and was lying on top of me.
I could hardly breathe. My eyes locked on the sky-blue of the bedspread. Everything else receded as if
it were happening far away, to someone else.

This was my first flashback. They continued over the next decade, upending my life, teaching me bit by
bit what I’d endured.

Grace
Most people would look at this chronology and see an unbearable life, likely to end in a breakdown,
addiction, or suicide. But that’s not the way I experienced it. Paradoxically, my ability to dissociate–to
sequester the experiences of horrific abuse outside the reach of my own consciousness–made it
possible to live, and thus to find the things that made my life worth living. As a child, for example, I
loved school–its predictable routine and clear expectations. I blossomed under the gaze of a beloved
teacher who once took me in for a night of popcorn and Godzilla. I loved the thrilling stacks of brand new Scholastic books that I got to choose from a catalog. I wrote poems and plays, sang in the choir,
played piano and organ, taught myself to draw. I loved nature, taking refuge at the creek down the
ravine across from our house, and later, in my teens and twenties, hiking the Appalachian Trail in the
The Blue Ridge Mountains.

And for the most part, while I waited for a bolt of inspiration to reveal the career I was meant to pursue,
I enjoyed the jobs I actually did. I waitressed, roofed a few barns, raked blueberries. Interned at an
environmental education center, edited a natural history magazine, designed activities for old people in
nursing homes, led school groups at nature centers. My belief in an idyllic future was misplaced, but it
kept me alive and moving forward. At length it came to me: I loved the work I was already doing,
especially teaching, in any form. If I wasn’t sure what to do next, I realized, I could watch where my feet
were taking me. I could trust my inner GPS to take me where I needed to go

At some point in my 30s, I attended a one-day mindfulness retreat at the Compassionate Ocean Dharma
Center in Minneapolis. It was a brilliant August day, the deep blue sky vaulting overhead. We’d been
meditating for several hours in the sunlit hall: walking, sitting, chanting, more walking, more sitting.
Finally, since the day was warm, the instructor asked us to go outside and find a place to sit alone. I
walked to a city park just a block away and sat down next to a fountain with a small man-made creek
bubbling over rocks. When I dropped my hand into the water, it split into two streams, throwing off white-gold sparks, outlining my wrist in quicksilver. Suddenly I saw the water as I’d never seen it before. It could change shape to occupy any space, reflect the shifting colors of the sky. It could transform from cold ice to free-flowing liquid, and leap, invisible, into the air. I saw it coursing around the planet, probing every possible nook and cranny like a bloodstream, vital to the survival of every living creature on earth.

Back inside, the instructor asked us to report on our experience. As I told the group about the water, I
felt the instructor smiling at me—no, he was beaming. It was as if some light poured out of his body
toward me, meeting and recognizing the same light in myself. We seemed to be having a silent
conversation, sharing what we had both discovered—an interior place overflowing with wonder and joy.
This moment of grace changed me. It didn’t take away the tumultuous road ahead, but it gave me a
ground, a realization that I was more than the sum of the trauma I’d experienced. That the deepest part
of me was whole, untouched, and always within reach.

Acceptance
In my mid-30s, I ended up at a local community college, tutoring and eventually teaching what I’d always
loved most: literature and writing. I met the man who’d become my husband of 30 years. Six years after
moving into our small house, we adopted a little boy from Guatemala who would become the greatest
joy of my life.

I’d be lying to say that was the end of the story. My love of teaching was tested by the stresses of working as a part-time adjunct: the financial collapse of 2008 that threatened my job; the weight of carrying students’ stories of poverty, homelessness, friends lost to drug overdoses; the constant
pressure to do more with less. My marriage was strained by the trauma I brought to it, by the demands of raising a child with ADHD and learning disabilities. At times new memories of abuse would breakthrough—though less and less often. There was no point of arrival at everlasting happiness. But I was doing far more than I had ever thought possible. I found inside myself the strength and commitment to persevere at doing what I loved, with the people I loved, even throughout the hardest of times. I gradually grew in compassion for myself, for all my lost and broken parts, for the difficult feelings I shared with every other human being.

I wish for you …
I’m not telling you to meditate, to become Buddhist or Christian or any religion, to choose one way of
healing over another. I’m not telling you that you’ll never again feel grief or terror or rage or despair.
What I want to say is that grace is all around you, right now: in doing the things you love, loving the
people who love you back, reveling in the beauty of music, art, and nature. In those quiet nudges that
take you where you need to go. You can and will grow into spaces you never thought possible—not
perpetual happiness, but real human life.

My wish for you is the hope for a better life, the courage of a lion, radical compassion for all that you’ve been and done and gone through, faith that your inner guide will lead you toward a self more capable and loving and whole than you’ve ever imagined.  I wish for you those moments of grace that tell you you’re already there.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Erin R. Burke

I’m a Minneapolis-based writer/editor, blogger, book reviewer, tutor, and former college English instructor–as well as a thriving survivor of childhood abuse.  I’ve been blogging about shifts in identity: from working to retirement, parenting to empty nest, teacher to artist (https://inbetween-selves.blogspot.com/).  I’ve also been blogging through the pandemic and contributed a year-long journal to Women Writing History: A Coronavirus Journaling Project at the National Women’s History Museum.  I’m passionate about writing and other creative practice as a means for sharing life stories, discovering purpose, and healing from trauma.  I live with my husband of 30 years, my 20-year-old son, and my cat Skippyjon!  You can learn more about the services I offer at https://www.tweakedits.com/ .

inbetween-selves.blogspot.com/