When You Don’t Fit the PTSD Mold – McCall Dempsey

I just discovered today is National PTSD Awareness Day. I thought I would take a minute and remind everyone that PTSD (like any other disorder) does not always have to fit perfectly in a well-defined black and white box. Recently, I have been doing the hard healing work from another PTSD ‘flare up’.

Years ago a therapist mentioned ‘PTSD’, my head spun. You have the wrong client. I  never suffered any of the trauma that is typically (and clearly) outlined when discussing PTSD. Therefore, it made it easy for me to write off my severe symptoms and anxiety as something I would eventually ‘get over’. 

My PTSD formed after enduring Marjorie’s early birth and cancer journey. The endless hospital stays, gut wrenching pain of watching your baby suffer and the fearful unknown. The PTSD symptoms started small and then grew into raging waves that knocked me down again and again. It became so severe I could not go to the grocery store with the kids because I *KNEW* they would be run over in the parking lot. I barely let them play in the driveway or in the ocean’s surf. I could not drive long distances without seeing flashes of horrible wrecks. I lived in a constant state of paralyzing hypervigilance. I suffered (and still do) with night terrors.

I went through EMDR, but it was only a bandaid. It did not heal the deep wounds of what I would later learn was chronic and complex PTSD. The years of Marjorie’s health journey, coupled with my own health journey last year left me paralyzed again a few months ago. The PTSD was back with vengeance. 

In February, I was shaken with news of two fellow cancer warriors relapsing. I suddenly became enraged and flooded with memories of Marjorie’s cancer journey. My mind left my body and went to the PICU nearly seven years prior. Suddenly I was back watching  her chest mechanically rise and fall with the push of the ventilator breathing for her. I could hear the whirr of the machines and feel the numbness in my bones again. I was drowning in the past and needed a lifeline.

I did the only thing I knew to do – I wrote. Furiously. On my keyboard I banged out every thought, feeling and memory. Then hit send – to my therapist it went. Unedited. Uncensored. 

“McCall,” she said as we sat down, “everything you sent me is trauma. It is unresolved PTSD.”

“No, no. It can’t be. I did that EMDR thing. Everything checked out. We are good to go.”

My therapist went on to explain that EMDR does not always work with chronic/complex PTSD. Meaning, I am the lucky recipient of one traumatic event after another. I had unfinished trauma to resolve.

This time was different though, I had a couch that was safe and a therapist I wholeheartedly trusted.