My New Normal

Over the last several weeks I have encountered a new experience when it comes to traumatic triggers. Certain words and images illicit an automatic response over which I have no control or agency.
The reaction is one of letting out a shout, trying to get away from whatever the trigger was, rolling into a ball, and becoming non-responsive (with or without crying). Once this is happened I have to try and find my way back to the now. I'm told this is a type of flashback and as far as my amygdala is concerned I have returned to a time 21 years ago.

As one can imagine this is very stressful not only for myself but also for those around me. Perhaps the worst part is that I have no control over this reaction. It is entirely involuntary and is just as intense whether I see an image or hear word related to certain medical equipment and procedures.

Not having any control over the situation, in fact not even knowing that it has happened until after the fact, is possibly the most terrifying aspect of the entire experience.

How do you deal with that complete loss of personal agency, how do you face the fact there is a thing that is so ubiquitous and yet causes a bypass of your Executive Function, your very power as an individual and leaves you crying in a heap, unable to control the situation, unable to control the loss of who you are in a moment? How has this become my new normal, taking away my ability to socialize, to watch television, to engage in the world around me for fear of suddenly losing that personal agency by encountering a trigger over which I have no control?

My primary care practitioner has told me that this is actually quite normal. He's ex-military and says that he knows people who seem fine for 10 or 15 years and then suddenly everything unravels. Somehow hitting the anniversary date at the 20th year caused everything to go downhill, and this is considered "normal."

The reason that post-traumatic stress becomes post-traumatic stress disorder is that there is no reestablishment of Safety and Security immediately after the traumatic event has taken place. By some estimates as many as 20% of people who have long hospital stays suffer from some kind of iatrogenic PTSD. And yet hospitals still refuse to let people who are staying keep their loved ones with them, their support structures with them, but send them away. They force the individual to lie in a dark room alone, in an environment for which we are not equipped to cope. We lie there hooked to whatever, machines or medicines or what have you, and there's nobody there to hold our hand and there's nobody there to make us feel safe and loved and wanted and alive.

Then, as a culture, we ignore the aftermath, the broken individuals who get through this ordeal. We care only for the mechanical functions of life and not the living of it beyond those parameters.

And all we can say is, this is your new normal.