My Story, at least what I can remember **Many Triggers**

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My Story, at least what I can remember **Many Triggers**

SurvivorOH

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I can no longer keep this demon in my mind at bay. For my whole life I have struggled with these unwanted feelings of guilt, shame and anxiety that I have discovered was no fault of my own. The problem is that until recently I did not even know what I was struggling with, I only knew that something was not right, being always anxious and frequently depressed. Only with the help of a wife who stands with me, a great therapist, anti-anxiety medications and an employer who understood my struggle and allowed me to take time off work for long therapy sessions have I finally come to realize what triggered these things and planted this demon in my head that I still struggle with.

The problem here is that on the outside I lived what looked like a normal life. I am married to a wonderful wife who has put up with this unknown thing for over 20 years now. We raised and nurtured 3 wonderful children into productive happy adults. We had small struggles here and there over the years financially but were able to hold things together raise the kids as healthy free thinkers who are now living their own lives with their own partners and doing fairly well. Not long ago I moved into an awesome position working a remote DevOps position, pay and benefits are great, it is the dream job for someone in my field. Stock options that have been vesting for a while now. Our home was paid off before I landed this position so financially we do not have a worry in the world. Really in all views this is the perfect life that would make many people happy.... But I was never happy. I was and still am to a lesser extent a walking ball of anxiety and depression. But as the status quo of this country goes, I am a 40+ year old male, I should be able to brush off anything and keep on with my life, no whining, no crying, no bitching, just deal with it and move on. And that is what I did until I hit a brick wall just after coming to work for this new company.

I had been at my previous position for over a decade. I wont go into the details of the bullshit I dealt with there, but lets just say I do not get along well with assholes flaunting big ego's but I dealt with it because it was a steady income while raising our children and the benefits were sort of ok but enough to keep everyone healthy. All the while I was totally miserable mentally. Nothing was ever fun, nothing interested me, I cared about very little except getting a paycheck and doing the best I could to keep the bills paid even through the rough patches. My thought was that all of my anxieties and depression had spawned by working a job I really didn't like for so many years, so a change of jobs should fix it all. Boy was I wrong.

I had accepted this new position and had been working, more training than anything, for about a month when I mentally ran straight into a brick wall. I literally could not think, nothing I read made sense, nothing I wrote made sense to me even trying to carry on a conversation things would get jumbled and I would start to panic, I tried to hide this for two days before my wife asked what was wrong. I could not explain it, I tried so hard to come up with an answer but the only thing I could come up with was "I dont' know". It got worse from there, the more I tried to come up with an answer the more I felt I was becoming distant to myself. At one point, and I still remember it like it was yesterday I became totally disconnected from myself as if I was outside of my body looking down on me. My wife apparently saw the distant look in my eyes and got a little scared, saying "I can not help you with this. I have done all I can do alone, would you be willing to see a therapist if I can find one." I was totally lost and agreed.

The problem with this was that we live in a small town so it was 2 weeks before I could even get in for an evaluation. I went back to my manager and explained this whole thing to him as best as I could. Without question the company gave me 2 weeks off with pay until I could make it to this appointment.
The first appointment was just an assessment. This assessment leads you to the therapist that you will see so then came up more waiting as it was 1 month before I could get into the actual therapist and in the mean time I had to fly across the country to a required company training. I had used my 2 weeks already and did not want to ask for more for fear of loosing the position I had worked so hard to get. I had never flown before and was more anxious than I had ever been thinking about being around dozens of people I didn't know, in a place I didn't know and having to fly there which I also didn't know. I had never flown before this. I was a total wreck but got everything setup to go, again with the help of my wife.

At this point I have to interject a bit about my wife. Without her I would be totally lost. For 20 years she took care of everything as I swung in and out of depression, massive fits of anxiety and multiple panic attacks along the way. Really it came down to I worked to bring in the paycheck and she took care of everything else including me. There never was any physical abuse, I made that promise to myself a long time ago after growing up in a home where fighting and arguing were a pretty normal occurrence. I swore at a young age I would never strike a female for any reason and I never have. But my constant mood swings, anxiety attacks, panic attacks, being triggered for no reason and everything that goes with that would be mentally taxing on even the strongest person. She is that person, I love her undenyingly and still have guilt issues about everything she put up with over the years. I foresee us being together forever and though I am still going through recovery I am trying so hard to pay her back for being there for me when most would have left me behind a long time ago. I just never have the right words or actions to say I love you now and forever what can I do to make it up to you.

I made the trip and survived though I was a wreck the whole time I was there because I was way out of my comfort zone. I came back home and stayed as strong as I could muster while waiting for the appointment. I got a lot of help from other members of my work team keeping my work up while waiting for the appointment. None of them knew about the situation and even today none of them know the whole story.
So I make it through to the appointment, of course anxiety building and building until I was at the point of exploding. I knew what therapists did and I was not sure I wanted someone prying into my mind. My mind was my refuge, I could hide there anytime I wanted, walled off in a small portion of my mind trying to ignore everything that bothered me. So the thought of someone digging around there besides me was not a thrilling thought. But I promised my wife I would try my hardest to cooperate with the therapist to get to the bottom of this.

For anyone that has had psychology training or even knows a little bit about psychology there is this thing called the defensive posture. Boy was I in a defensive posture while in the waiting room and even when I got to the therapist. Sitting straight up, arms crossed, staring a hole through the wall because I did not want to do this, I did not want to talk about me, I just wanted to answer a few questions and go on about my way.

I did not know what to expect of my therapist, I of course had my preconceived notions of what a therapist would be and was on the defensive to throw back bullshit answers just to get this done and get them out of my head. But my therapist caught me slightly off guard. She was not what I expected at all. Compared to me at 5'10" and near 300 lbs she is much shorter and very small framed, oddly this put me somewhat at ease. When we finally started talking she held a smile through the whole thing and had this look of concern in her eyes. Something about her mannerisms and personality had a calming effect... maybe natural maybe learned, but it opened a small crack in my bubble and I let her in.

We went through the normal barrage of questions, "Can you tell me why you need a therapist." "Do you drink alcohol." "Do you smoke cigarettes." "Do you do any other illegal drugs." "Do you use marijuana." "Was there any physical or mental abuse at home." and on and on, do you do this do you do that, have you done this or that. I answered with all honesty. "I don't know why I need a therapist, that is why I am here.", "No I rarely drink alcohol, my dad was an alcoholic and I didn't like the stupid shit he did while drinking." "Yes I smoke cigarettes" "No I do not use any other illegal drugs." "Yes I use marijuana." "No there was no physical abuse and no direct mental abuse but indirect as I see it." and on and for almost an hour.

I thought we were about done and why she saved this question till the end I do not know, but then it came. "Was there ever any sexual abuse in your childhood." I hesitated, she didn't say anything. My mind anxiously searched for a way out of this situation, I did not want to answer this question, then all of the memories flooded back in, everything I had spent my whole life trying to hide from hit me like a train. "Yes. But not by my parents." was the answer.
I had kept this locked away so far in the back of my mind that it even surprised me, the answer echoed in my ears. Now I was going to have to deal with all of this, everything I had hidden for the last 30+ years. I started firing rapid fire excuses for why I had never told anyone, why I had lived with it for so long, why I was hesitant about it now. After I got all of that out of the way her reassuring words were "It was not your fault.". Though her words were reassuring that is a hard thought to drop since I lived so many years in the world that I had. We talked a little bit more before the appointment was over and she gave my diagnosis as hyper-vigilant PTSD and setup and appointment for the next week and a prescription for Zoloft.

Up to this point no one knew about this except my wife and that was only because during one of my severe swings into anxiety not long before the appointment I screamed it at her so she would leave me alone.

I have been in therapy for almost two years now, we have brought out so many memories I had been hiding that all hinged on this hypervigilence. The abuse was from a half uncle that still lived with my grand parents a couple hours away from where I lived. I would go visit them in the summer and stay for about a month. As we dug deeper into my memories the abuse started when I was about 4 years old until I adamantly refused to go down there anymore when I was around 10 years old. There were times when I told my parents I did not want to go but never gave a reason, I just didn't want to go. But this was their time with no kids so I would not say I was forced to go down there but I would end up there anyway. This is still hard for me to type because of the stereotype males are slapped with. You know, deal with it, its a guy thing, scared because of the jokes that may be made if anyone found out and so on.

There is no doubt that at times there is the, show me yours and I will show you mine thing, I would not classify this as normal but it is a known thing. But this was way beyond that, everything from oral sex to anal penetration. Of course as happens in a lot of these causes it revolved around a "If you tell anyone we will both get in trouble." There was a lot of pornography involved, starting with magazines and graduating to videos when VCR's became available. The age difference here was 6 years, so when this started he was 10 and I was 4, it may have been earlier but i can only remember back that far, when it ended I was 10 and he was 16.

As we explored more of the memories through therapy so much sickness came into my head I did not want these memories. I remember bits and pieces of him also molesting girls in a garage while I watched being told "it's ok, they want to do it.", all of this again while I was 4 - 10 years old. I remember him doing the same thing with his half brother, my other half uncle like it was just a daily thing. Sometimes he would even give gifts, money or otherwise to get things going. At one one point he did get caught with another nephew from the other side of the family.... Nothing was done, by that time my grandparents had "found god" and they would let the church take care of it. Not a god damned thing was done, it was swept under the carpet and he kept on with this bullshit. And the next time I see him it was the same old shit, "You have not told anyone have you? We would both get in trouble."

Now as I mentioned above there was oral sex both ways and anal penetration, the bow on that package was this was all happening when the initial scare of AIDS was all over the news and the now debunked myth that it only happened to homosexual men. So I was fucking scared for years that I would end up with AIDS or I had AIDS and then someone would find out and I would get in just as much trouble as he did while dying from an incurable disease and the only way to get that disease is if you were homosexual. I was not dumb at that age and knew what homosexual was so put those numbers together and figure it out.

Around the time I was 5, my mom who could not explain my persistent anxiety and mood swings took me to the doctor and convinced them I needed Ritalin. So from the time I was about 5 until the doctor said no more when I was 14 I was fucked up on Ritalin all the time. Total misdiagnosis but I cant blame her really I guess, it was the only thing she knew to explain why I was the ball of nerves I always was and rarely slept. The truth is I never fucking slept because I was afraid. There was a never what I was afraid of it was just afraid. I was never on Ritalin in the summer the doctor always stopped it when school was out. But otherwise I was a zombie 9 months out of the year and I think it really screwed up my learning patterns. Even today it is very hard to spend any amount of time directly studying anything, I can rarely sit through a whole movie before I get bored with it and have to find something else today.

Another thing that this led to was me doing the same thing with the older teen males of a few "family friends" while my parents were partying in a drugged haze with the parents. By that time I didn't see anything wrong with it because why? Well it felt good and it was attention I which was not getting at home. I was about 6 - 7 the years this happened. (This part triggers me so bad I added it days after I originally wrote this.)

As we explored more deeply into all of these disgusting memories more and more came out. As you get older you put things together that didn't really make sense in the past on top of the fact that lock on my box of bad memories was now open and certain situations cause those memories to come to the front. There were signs all over the place that one of my dads full brothers molested his step daughters. Come to find out the father of the half uncle that had molested me (who I never knew) had died in prison for guess what, molesting young boys. Apparently even my parents knew that he had molested my uncle before he went to prison for molesting other boys but again nothing was done about it except threats of violence if it ever happened again blah, blah, blah.

Now if that was not bad enough, around the time I was 13 my mother tried to commit suicide, 2 years later her and my dad split up and her mental health took a death spiral. She was in and out of the psychiatric ward at the local hospital and at one point was taking 32 pills per day, all prescribed. So I ended up taking care of her and my sister the best I could just trying to keep the peace and having no idea what I was doing.

I cant type any more on this subject. The facts are there, all of this is true and I live in the hell of these memories every fucking day of my life.
 
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