What Am I Feeling?
Copyright 2024 By Jesse Donahue
What am I feeling? It has been four to five years since the concept of a trauma disorder made an appearance and a diagnosis in my life; I am sixty-eight years old. A diagnosis of CPTSD, a trauma disorder, was made by a Clinical Psychologist. Admittedly, it is tough to be diagnosed with a disorder that hasn’t even been acknowledged to exist as a diagnosis in our land of the DSM.
I grew up in the sixties and sought out therapy in the late seventies or the first year of the eighties. Psychoanalysis still held sway with many of the powers that be back then. Psychoneurosis was the culprit I suffered from back then. It’s funny how the term lost favor over the decades, yielding to trauma disorders, but still, personality disorders have survived to our present day. Sometimes, it seems the baby was gleefully tossed out along with the bathwater regarding psychoanalysis as a legitimate source of intellectual understanding of the human mind. I suppose it is neither here nor there today, but I’ve just wanted to make a point: “Don’t completely whitewash the utter genius our forefathers handed down to us. Without them and their astonishing insights and mind maps of human suffering, we would be lost in the wilderness.” Returning to where I started, “What am I feeling?”
My lungs begin to clench, which makes filling them nearly impossible
As of the last year or so, I have been taking a new tactic when I experience what I’ve learned to call a CPTSD flashback of an earlier emotional state. My feelings at the moment can come upon me, often unexpectedly, as a raw state of gut-ugly, unexplainable psychological pain. What am I feeling? What is coming over me? Is this a panic attack? My lungs begin to clench, which makes filling them nearly impossible. My psychic state becomes that of being paranoid, unable to confront others in the moment. I typically feel as though I want to curl up into a fetal position and rock myself to make it stop, to make it go away. How would that look at the kitchen table or in the classroom? WHAT AM I FEELING?
If I take various medications, often this emotional experience is awakened, causing me to quickly get off the meds. I am extremely sensitive to this nearly unbearable feeling state that lives perpetually within me, but it is often held or kept out of my emotional experience. My behavior subconsciously knows this emotional upheaval is lurking below, and that sets the stage for other “diagnoses” that manifest from within. What do I feel?! I can no longer escape this question.
I can’t know what others are feeling or describe their experiential moment. Hell, I can barely describe what “I” am feeling. I cannot put a definitive finger on what comes over me. My present inclination is to label the torturous burden I have lived as “REJECTION.” Perhaps it is a state of abandonment emanating from the earliest memories of an internalized, living, traumatic experience. But as keenly and consistently as this energy is regurgitated and re-lived within me, it has to be an emotional experience I endured repeatedly. Repeated emotional states of being touched to the depths of what it is like to be flat-out rejected as a child. Wouldn’t you think? Why else would I know this lifelong, usually unconscious “terror” as a built-in framework of my inner emotional life? Where did this feeling that overtakes me come from? What am I feeling, and why am I feeling it?!
(RSD Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I hope to finish soon an essay regarding Rejection Sensitivity and the state of Rejection dysphoria that many come to live with. Until then, if you relate to suffering from a feeling of rejection, look up RSD as used in psychology).
IT IS NOT JUST ME WHO IS IN AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS
Was it okay for me to be different as a toddler and a growing boy, whether I was or wasn’t “different”? Were the raging assaults with “the belt” and the open hand truly appropriate to the moment’s punishment? Where did my mother’s rage toward me come from? I now know it was not I who caused her emotional rage; it was her own flavor of “What Am I Feeling” that hypnotically commandeered her emotional moment… driving her to assault me. As an adult, my mission is to seek and find the answer to what I feel. I know I’m not alone because one thing I’ve learned about us humans is that when I am feeling something, IT IS NOT JUST ME WHO IS IN AN EMOTIONAL CRISIS. It is me suffering the way others who were treated like me are also experiencing. I’ll bet that too many of us suffer the experience of WHAT AM I FEELING, yet we can’t bring ourselves to tell the familiar story. It feels too shameful, that toxic feeling of brutal shaming for feeling damaged (Toxic Shame).
If you are suffering, please don’t think you are alone. If you feel it, it is because that is how a human feels when they are mistreated in their youth. How could it possibly be our fault when we were such helpless children? You can’t argue with that. It was not our fault.
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*Copyright notice. All writings are copyrighted and registered with the Library of Congress.
Therapy has helped improve self-understanding and writing skills through journaling and essays. Although this writing journey began in later years, it has led to 70+ essays oriented around issues with CPTSD… a trauma disorder.
My writings, which include therapy notes, poems, novels (unpublished), and essays, are all a part of my ongoing personal therapy. Initially, the essays, intended for my therapist’s eyes only, began with exposing my thoughts, fears, and feelings (or the lack of) onto paper… a journal of therapy notes. Then, with fear overcome and via a personal decision, I shared them with the readers. *My thanks to the editor of the CPTSD Foundation. My intent is to encourage readers to recognize traits in themselves and find (if desired) a therapist when they are willing and ready for that step. For some of us, it can be a long and challenging process, over extensive periods, to awaken to the unconscious issues that cause us to act out in life. Our behavior may seem like dancing to a buried, invisible cause we cannot directly see or confront. It is my sincere hope that my insights will assist the reader in the process toward reaching a deeper self-understanding.
Bringing the unconscious out into the light of self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance fosters self-love and the process of change.
Jesse B. Donahue
*Type a keyword into the foundations search engine. (Jesse, Heart, Personal, Twelve, Bugaboo, etc.) Or, Type Jesse Donahue at The CPTSD Foundation on a Google search.
Published with the CPTSD foundation. Top 10 essays in order of views:
- The Heart of the Matter
- Personal Honor, Integrity, Dignity, Honesty
- Twelve Days Without Coffee
- The Hidden Bugaboo
- Learned Helplessness
- Cast Out of Eden by Toxic Shame
- Codependency – Overriding the Monster of Self-Hate
- The Emptiness of Yesterday
- Surfing the Light Through the Darkness
- The Man Who Lives Under the Bridge
Other published writings at the foundation (in no particular order):
What an Outside Appearance May Not Show. Designer Identity.
The Crumbs and The Banquet. Inspirational Tugging – Teachers.
Obedience to the Light – Bombs or Love. We are but Storytellers.
Stepping Into the Shoes of Who You Are. Living in the Dis-World.
A Writer’s Brain – The Gift. The Highway of Worries.
The beganning. SPECTRUM.
