PTSD? Or just paranoid

My head has gone into a dark place. I’m not even sure I can pin point where the entrance to this dark place came from.

I’m back at work and in the local news over the last few days has been full of a siege that lasted overnight, ram raids, persons of interest to police, cars of interest to police (in the ram raid).

I made the mistake of finding out more detail on the jobs. Maybe I also made the mistake of staying up and watching NCIS and Criminal Minds over the last couple of nights.

I even stumbled on a news article of a North Korean who had escaped from a gulag. His story is Escape from Camp 14 and I read a portion of his book on Amazon. He was born in the prison camp and therefore knew nothing better and his dissociative behaviour and emotional disconnect intrigued me.

I don’t understand then how I can watch programs, read crime books, read true life accounts and have PTSD (if indeed it is effecting me) about my job. Like I said I don’t recall any particular trigger this morning.

I went to bed last night around 11pm having watch an episode of Criminal Minds in which the unsubs were playing out an online gaming video in real life and manipulating the “pawns” to kill or be killed.

I had got some study done earlier in the evening, had a cat lying to one side of me, beagle in my lap almost and daughter cosied up in the corner, even my youngest boy had tried sitting (on my lap almost) for a little while (he’s quite tactile and likes sitting next to me touching arms).

So it was a semi-normal evening. Dinner was before 7pm, a simple meal of pizza and garlic bread. I’d checked on our “Houdini chicken” – she’s home and badly traumatised from a dog attack and the rooster and her buddy have vanished. The fire was lit but my spirit was unsettled.

Even after Criminal Minds, when tv gets bizarre and it’s too late to really want to start watching another show (Hannibal was on – what is with the fascination in murder?!). I sat on the edge of the couch and eventually took myself up to bed to join hubby who had gone up earlier.

Finally in bed I picked up my book, Sisters of the Quilt, completely different (except there was a rape) but it’s set in an Amish community, something totally different from my life, tantalising, but also exploring the mental state of the main character as she deals with life and silence after a trauma.

Sleep seemed ok as I don’t remember any of it until I was woken up by our psychotic cat meowing down our hallway. Hubby let him out but by then I was awake, my alarm had gone off, my youngest’s alarm was sounding in his room and it was time to start the day.

What I do recall when I woke up was probably the tail end of a dream but I don’t know now what it was or whether it was just my brain starting the day with a memory. All I do know for certain was that my mood turned snappy, it was thinking about previous jobs I’ve done and I didn’t want to be thinking about them. Then there was my self-judgment that “What have I PTSD from?!” Have I even experienced anything that would traumatise me in such a way that I dread my “real job” rather than this “pretend job”?

It’s the one thing that throughout all of my treatment for depression that hasn’t come to the fore. But yesterday I was feeling good about work, feeling good in myself, feeling capable of kicking myself in the butt to do some study rather than crash and burn into a heap.

I was holding forth that doing this subject of statistics (which isn’t thrilling to think about but easier when I’m actually doing it) is towards the goal of a Psychology degree. Without that incentive I don’t think I could motivate myself to continue.

Then this morning my mood turns dark. Hubby asks if I’m ok. I know I’m not and say so but I don’t want to talk about it so I snap. He asks me again when I’m making coffee, “What’s wrong?” and I say it doesn’t matter. He gets shitty with me then and starts taking it out on everyone else so I turn him around and say “I’m not ok, it’s not you and I don’t want to talk about it”. He still doesn’t like that but at least he stops trying to probe.

I wonder if it could be mild PTSD, I’ve looked it up on Google (possibly even last night – time, memory is blurry and I can’t find words I’m looking for to explain things properly) and checked on the treatments of PTSD – facing the trauma.

OMG that’s the last thing I want to do! I don’t want to willingly go back there. My coping mechanism for so long has been avoidance. A light touch of the subject and then run away. It’s my way of keeping control, but that control is now falling apart and I am finding that being back in my work uniform and in the environment is bringing it all to the surface and I don’t want to go there (to the memories)!

I feel like an emotional mess again and having taken steps backwards. I want to just quit the job, quit the place I live in, break off all contact and run away to a different life. But I’m still me in that and I can’t run away from myself…

I better do some work as a distraction, enough of the brooding

Pip