Post. Traumatic. Stress. Disorder.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that some people develop after seeing or living through an event that caused or threatened serious harm or death. According to the 2005 National Comorbidity Survey-Replication study, PTSD affects about 7.7 million American adults in a given year, though the disorder can develop at any age, including childhood. Symptoms include strong and unwanted memories of the event, bad dreams, emotional numbness, intense guilt or worry, angry outbursts, feeling “on edge,” and avoiding thoughts and situations that are reminders of the trauma. National Institutes of Health report: PTSD

It was my oldest daughter who insisted that I show signs of the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. I scoffed at the idea. That's what my father has, and for good reasons. He's served in both Korea and Vietnam. I really didn't see it as being an issue in my life. Besides, don't I have enough "issues" already? Recovering from food addiction, in my experience, is quite enough to have to deal with. But after many up and downs in my recovery, I finally had to concede that maybe something is going on within my mental/emotional processing that keeps causing depression, anxiety, despair and finally, the inevitable "first bite" of food that I have for years had difficulty restraining my consumption. So, I got on my computer and did the research. Unfortunately, I didn't like what I uncovered.

Since I'm a Kaiser Permanente patient (sorry, I can't link to their site; but you can go here, here or here for more information), I went to their website, read everything I could about it, and found an self-assessment form. I filled out the assessment and looked at the scoring ranges, which was:

If your score is:
0 – 16 = No symptoms of PTSD.
17 – 20 = No to minimum symptoms of PTSD.
21 – 29 = Mild symptoms of PTSD.
30 – 49 = Moderate symptoms of PTSD.
50 – 86 = Severe symptoms of PTSD.

My score? 73. Pretty solidly PTSD. Who knew? I sure didn't.

Suddenly, the memories began rushing in, and even though I was extremely upset and sad by their appearance, I felt like I had finally found the missing puzzle pieces. I'm not "constitutionally incapable of being honest with (myself) themselves" , as the book "Alcoholic Anonymous" states. Nor am I looking for the "softer, easier way" to recover from food addiction. Just because I could have PTSD doesn't mean I expect special consideration, i.e., a "pass" on eating "weighed and measure meals with nothing in between, no flour, no sugar, and no excess portions" or using the tools of the program to get from one meal to the next. It simply means, as far as I'm concerned, I get counseling that focuses on decreasing the effects PTSD has had on my life, and especially, my recovery.

But what does PTSD look like if you aren't a military veteran who has been in combat situations? I don't know about anyone else, but mine began with a military veteran--my father, who had served in Korea and Vietnam.

I was fourteen years old in in the spring of 1972, and already in the point of absolutely no return as far as food addiction goes. At that time, I weighed anywhere between 210 to 220 pounds, and I was ashamed of my body and miserably depressed about my inability to stay on diet most of the time. One day, I sitting on my bed listening to my radio, and I heard my mother saying something to my father. As usual, I ignored them and continued gazing out of my window while listening to the music. My father appeared in the bedroom doorway and told me to turn the music down. Like most teenagers, I was annoyed with that directive, but I reached over to turn down the volume. Next thing I knew, something that felt like large rock struck the right side of my face, and I went flying backwards across my bed. Stunned, I looked up and saw my father glaring at me. He pointed a right index finger in my face and snarled, "You better move faster when I tell you something to do, you hear me?" I couldn't say anything. My throat closed up and I could feel the tears dripping off my chin. He had never, ever done anything like that before, and fortunately, he never did it again.

I don't remember much of what happened after that. I know I stayed in bed crying, and I wasn't allowed to go to school until the black eye had completely healed. Maybe my mother gave me an ice pack for my eye, maybe she didn't. Maybe she came in my bedroom and tried to explain  my father's irrational explosion to me, maybe she didn't. All I know is that nothing was ever said about the incident. The message was unspoken, but clear. I was to act like it never happened and tell absolutely no one about it at school or anywhere else.  And I didn't, until I wrote this blog forty years later.

Being addicted to food is catastrophic to one's physical and mental health, but over the years, I found it to be  an excellent temporary balm to any emotional wound, including my father hitting me in a sudden fit of rage . The downside is, like drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling or shopping, it takes rapidly increasing amounts of the substance or behavior (for me, it was food like a double cheeseburgers with bacon, lettuce, tomatoes and onions, large fries and a large chocolate shake) to get that calming, drowsy relief from the mental and emotional storms that raged (and persist to this day) inside me. By the time I graduated from high school, I was stuffing down enough food to bring my weight up to 240 pounds.  When I was an English major and a supposed to be a graduating senior at California State University at Sacramento, I weighed 265 pounds. I rarely showed up for my classes, and when I did, all I could do was either think about what (and where) I was going to eat as soon as I got out or I fantasized about having a boyfriend. My once honor roll grade point average dropped to 1.85, and I was on academic probation. So I left school, went on a starvation diet that made me drop 57 pounds in four months, found a job as a newspaper writer, AND...lo and behold, a boyfriend seemed to magically pop into my life. I thought I had found the answer to all of my problems. Lose weight, get a job and a man--life is good.

As that old saying goes, history has a way of repeating itself. In my case, I didn't see the signs or recognize the familiar patterns. Like many people who grew up in alcoholic families, I had no idea that I was repeating my past, and even if I had some inkling, I would have denied it. "I never saw my father hit my mother," I would have told a person who might have suggested that I was turning into a carbon copy of my mother. And that would have been an absolutely true statement. He didn't my mother. And he only hit me once. Yeah, it was pretty harsh; my eye closed and it was red, black and blue for almost two weeks, but so what? He never did it again, and that's all that matters. It's in the past.

Well, that boyfriend became my husband (now ex) and the father of my three children. I didn't know it back then, but he had, and still has, one the most maniac types of bi-polar disorder, a heavy addiction to cocaine, marijuana, crack and sex with numerous women, and an aversion to finding and keeping suitable employment to help his growing family. Worst of all for me, he had been severely abused by an insane, autocratic step-father. No, I didn't see it coming. Repeating the past? No way! My dad not only hit me JUST that one time, but he ALWAYS worked and provided us. How could anyone say I was repeating the past? Besides, that's all over and done. I've "moved on".

During the six and one half years we were married, he slapped me numerous times, usually because I didn't respond to him "with respect", or I wasn't "paying attention" to him. It was true; I didn't respect him, or to be even more honest, like him. Pay attention to him? Please. He was a full grown adult; his "attention time" should have happened with his mother, so as far as I was concerned, his neediness was not my problem. Our children, however, were a different story. They needed to be cared for by at least one rational thinking adult. Not only that, I had a household to run with whatever money I managed to hide from him to pay the bills. He hated holding down a job (I did that most of the time), took what little money we had and spent it on drugs and all kinds of women, then expected me to be his adoring fan, no matter what he did. I found very little to respect.

(By the way, the behavior and attitude that I've described in the previous paragraph is known as "codependency". In this excerpt from the WebMD article that I've linked to, you can read what kind of codependent I was):

Still, the codependent partner often finds some type of reward in this setup. "Probably the most significant theme is a sense of control," Bochner says. "The other person plays the out-of-control person, and so the codependent partner gets to be the person who is in control and thus respected."He says the partner who is codependent can be "the better person, the smarter person, the person who's recognized as having it all together. They're defining themselves as strong enough to deal with it when actually they need to realize that maybe they should be taking care of themselves instead of proving their strength."

 I won't go into detail about the physical abuse involved in that marriage because even though it has been nearly 30 years of numbing out the pain and stuffing the memories down with food, reviewing that period of my life feels very raw. But this is what happened:

1. He became angry because I had to go to a work related event, and he wanted me to stay home and cook for him. He shoved me down on the ground, grabbed the still-hot iron that I was using to iron my clothes, and held it over my face, telling me he would burn it off unless I promised to stay home.

2. After a July 4, 1981 argument, he pinned me down in the back seat of his mother's little Datsun beater, and smashed his fist into my face repeatedly. According to the x-rays, his fist came within a millimeter of crushing my temple, the doctor in ER said. He was upset and wanted me to call the police. My parents did it for me. A few days later, I entered the hospital to have reconstructive surgery on my face.

3. After another argument, he grabbed our oldest daughter, who was about 16 months old, and our son, a one month old infant, held them over the balcony of our two floor apartment and threatened to drop them. I completely broke down to the ground, crying hysterically. He told me, "You know I wasn't going to do that. You know I would never do that." He frequently said after threatening me or the children.

4. He broke down the front door after being on the run for two months with a teen-aged girl who was a foster home resident, screamed at me about how I was "keeping him away from his kids", pulled out a very long, serrated Bowie hunting knife out of his pants pocket and tried to stab me with it. I fought him off with a closet pole.

After we split up, I numbed the pain with King Henry VIII sized portions of food, and ate my way up to 400 pounds. I'm no longer anywhere close to that weight, but I've been struggling with my recovery for almost two years now. Hopefully, with therapy and support of my 12 step friends, I will be able to "trudge the Road of Happy Destiny."

John Bradshaw - Healing The Shame That Binds You (Part 2)

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - Health Matters

Take him back?? Rianna's CRAZY!!!

I've been resisting writing about this Rianna/Chris Brown situation for many reasons, mainly because of where I am in my recovery from food addiction. I don't need a reason to eat; my food-addicted brain seizes upon every single nanosecond that I don't connect to God and use the tools of recovery to pound me with cravings. I'm not exaggerating; this is what life is like for me right now.

Food numbs me. I don't feel emotions very much when I'm stuffed with my favorite comfort foods, like fresh baked bread smothered with butter. What I get from food is a warm, soothing, euphoric sensation like being safely bundled up in a soft, thick quilt. Absolutely nothing bothers me. Unfortunately, that feeling is only temporary. And I usually find myself having to eat more in order to get that level of comfort going again. This desperate need for comfort has led me to eat so much that I have binged to the point of extreme physical pain, and/or passed on my couch. There's not much difference between what I do with food, and what an alcoholic or drug addict does with their substances of choice. Same behavior, different drugs.

What does this have to do with the Rianna/Chris Brown situation? For me, a lot. At one point in my life, I was just like Rianna, sans the fame. I was an abused woman. Food kept the film clips of that period of my life running on a screen in the back room of my mind.

I don't like to re-visit those memories. I won't say that I've buried them, but I don't live in them everyday. Ideally, I would very much like to forget that it ever happened. But it did. And as uncomfortable as it makes me feel right now, the Rianna/Chris Brown situation keeps reminding me that I have literally escaped with my life.

However, I am also a writer, and one who has always felt the need to pass along information that might be of some importance to the reader. I don't just write solely for "artistic expression" or an ego-centric need to see myself in print, although I won't deny that my massive ego gets involved a lot more than I care to admit. But I am (at least) aware that a writer has a responsibility to the reading public by providing needed information and thereby being of service to others. This is not altruism; it is recognizing what should be done (kind of like smelling a baby's dirty diaper and changing it, regardless of the voluminous amount of stinkiness) and fulfilling it to the best of one's ability. Despite my personal discomfort and unwillingness to explore feelings that have lay dormant for almost three decades, I strongly feel that I should live up to that responsibility. And remain abstinent while doing it, even though every thought in my brain is screaming, you pompous, self-gratifying bitch! What do you think you're doing? You can't tell people about that dark hellhole you used to live in! You just want sympathy, you big wuss! (sigh) I can do this. I can do this.


So, with your permission, I want you to take a journey back in time with me. The year is 1981, and the date is Independence Day, aka the Fourth of July. You, the reader, have become me, circa 1981. You are a twenty three year old African American woman, married to an unemployed artist/musician who is also bi-polar(untreated)and addicted to marijuana, cocaine, and serial relationships with women. You feel he is brilliant, talented, uniquely thoughtful and articulate, and you want the rest of the world to know about his prodigious artistic talents. But he doesn't necessarily want the same for himself, and sabotages every effort you make to bring out vast store of artistry within him. You don't understand this, and you keep trying.

There are many problems with this relationship. One, you have given birth to a gorgeous baby girl almost three months earlier, and your husband seems completely unaware of the responsibility involved in raising a child. He still behaves as if he were single--partying, doing drugs and sleeping with LOTS of other women. This causes an enormous amount of friction in the relationship. Your communication is fraught with accusations, anger and resentment. Your nerves are in state of constant upheaval, and you anxious about the future for you and your newborn girl. Should you leave him permanently? You are already back at home with your parents because your husband refuses to exert much effort toward finding a job and supporting you and the baby.

"I'm no punk for the white man," he tells you. "I can't have no punk-ass ordering me around like a slave. I'll go back to jail before I do that."

He often makes that threat because he knows it bothers you. You don't want him to be :just another black man incarcerated" statistic. He can do so MUCH BETTER than that, if he would only TRY!

The anger and resentment toward has been escalating prodigiously since your daughter's birth on May 15th. You keep trying to come up with solutions to the problem, which you earnestly pitch to your husband on a daily basis. He adamantly refuses your help with a vehemence that you cannot understand. Doesn't he know that you are only trying to get your little family back together by offering a plan to jump start his career in art and music so that he would be happy with his work AND provide a living for you, him and the baby? Why doesn't he understand this and cooperate? It's so maddeningly frustrating!

After two months of increasingly furious arguments, you declare a cease-fire for the Fourth of July. He says he wants you and the baby to accompany him to a barbecue with his family, which consists of his mother (who has been emotionally estranged from him since his birth), and his two sisters. You sense the volatility of the situation, but you consent to go anyway. They pick you up from your parents' house, which fills you with guilt because it also their 24th wedding anniversary. You choose your husband over your parents, who have been supporting you during this tumultuous period. On top of that, you can practically take a bite out of the cake-like animosity between your husband and his mother, which has been thinly frosted over with civility. This is not going to be a very good holiday. But you are going to make the best of it.

He asks to hold the baby because as he says, "doesn't get to see his little girl very much", implying that you and your parents prevent him from seeing his daughter. This sets your teeth on edge. You don't exert much effort to come see her, you say to yourself. You're too busy getting high and f***ing around with other women. But you say nothing, and pass your daughter to her father, who is sitting in the front seat next to his mother. She is driving, and taking everyone to her friend's house for food and fireworks. Other than the initial courteous greeting, she doesn't say much to you.

Soon, your husband begins the usual litany of complaints about your "Southern, country-ass, think-they-better-than-everyone-else parents" who make it difficult for him to "come see his baby". That's it. You've had enough of this nonsense.

"Maybe if you took care of business and got a decent job, you wouldn't have to deal with my parents' attitudes," you inform him.

(continued below)

Take him back?? Rianna's CRAZY!!! (pt. 2)

He whirls around, his caramel-colored face turning red and his nostrils flaring like a rabid mustang.

"What? A job ain't gonna change your siditty (slang for conceited) assed parents, especially your mama! Your mama ain't nothin' but a stuck-up, country-fried, siddity BITCH!"

He punctuates the last statement by roughly shoving his index finger into your sternum. You see nothing but red, and the entire world falls away, still and quiet, waiting to see what you will do. You snatch his finger away from your chest and bend it backwards. Then you take the can of soda you have been drinking, and smash it violently against the side of his face. There, you say to yourself as you watch the fizzling drops "Tahiti Punch" drip off his cheek, and his natal-spawned, mother-love-deprived primal rage building into a mushroom cloud. Take that, you piss-colored, low-life bastard! No one talks about my mama like that!

He roars in pain and indignity, and orders his mother to pull the car over. She mutely obeys. He hands your daughter to his mother, then turns around. Suddenly, you realize that you are no longer looking at your husband. You are staring in horror at grotesquely twisted face of a monster.

Time becomes meaningless as you watch in complete disbelief as his fist pounds into your face. You hear the smack of each blow, and it sounds like a thick steak being slapped against a kitchen counter top. This isn't happening. It can't be happening. You are a good person, a good woman. Why is doing this? Desperately, you try to return the punches, but he has leaned way over the car seat, and he has the higher ground, the advantage. You can do nothing but land a glancing hit, which doesn't seem to do anything but enrage the animal who has replaced your husband. The barrage of punches land steadily, methodically, and you become dully aware of blood flooding down your nose and out of your mouth. Your arms no longer longer have the strength to raise your hands anymore, and there is no response to the mental command, fight back. FIGHT BACK! But the pounding continues relentlessly.

The world drains away slowly. Your eyes have become tiny slits which offer nothing but hazy, out of focus vision. Somehow you are aware of screams and cries, presumably from your husbands' sisters and your daughter. But you're not sure. All you know is the fists have suddenly stopped tenderizing your face, and you are marinating in your own blood. You can't move. Time has stopped.

You cry out for your daughter, but the animal sound coming from your throat is unrecognizable. You are trying to say, give me my daughter! Give her to me! You want to take her and run away, get away from these primordial ooze-like creatures. They can't be human. Real human beings wouldn't allow such an atrocity to happen to another person. You have to get your daughter and run away from these mutated life forms.

You don't know where you are, and how you got there. All you know is that you are in an unfamiliar place, someone's bedroom. You have no idea what happened to the mutants who brought you to this place, and you don't know the people who have bandaged you and placed cold wash clothes on your face. All you want is to get your daughter and to go home.

During the weeks that follow, you attempt to make sense of what seems to be a totally illogical situation. Somehow, your parents found out where you were, and they came. They saw what was done to your face, and dissolved into tears. You've never seen your father cry before. It was terrible. They immediately called the police, and suddenly, the dozen people or more who apparently lived in the place where you were disappeared. After the police report was made, your parents took you to the emergency room. X-rays of your face were made. The technician called in the doctor of radiology to examine the pictures. The doctor was enraged.

"Who did this to you?" Righteous indignation caused him to sputter out his words as he pointed to breaks in your face that showed up on the x-rays. "Whoever did this to you needs to be put UNDER the jail!"

You are ashamed. How could you admit that you were dumb enough to marry a man who would punch you so hard that he came within centimeters close to shattering the right temporal bone, which would have killed you? He did manage, however, to break your zygomatic, or cheek bone. The entire right side of your face looked like a deflated balloon.

"You're lucky to be alive. We have to do surgery to repair your cheek. Someone will schedule the appointment."

He stormed out in disgust, leaving you alone in the exam with your below-dirt sense of self. One-celled organisms probably felt better about themselves than you did.

Little did you know right then that your self esteem would plunge even lower. Everyone seemed to know what you should do, yet you had no grasp of which path led to your way out of this mess.

"LEAVE HIM!"

Your family and friends made the decision seem so easy. But then what? Stay with your parents? That just didn't feel right. The aching despair that overwhelmed you every night was already unbearable. Stay with him? Well...he cried so much as he told you how horrible he felt about himself. He thought about suicide because everyone would be so much better off if he were dead. That was alarming. You couldn't have that on your conscience. After all...he was your baby's daddy! With a lot of marriage counseling, you could make it work! He would feel better about himself, get a job, and everything would work out JUST FINE! You just needed to be alone with him to talk it over, make the counseling appointments and get your little family back together.

So that's what you did. And you stayed for six more years, even though the promised counseling appointments never happened. He didn't beat you up anymore. Your father and brother went after him with loaded deer-hunting shotguns after the cheek bone incident, so he didn't try that again. But he stole all the household money for drugs and his extra-marital affairs. And he lied, lied, lied. Constant upset in your home, continuous drama. And it didn't end until the day he pulled out a huge Bowie knife and tried to stab you. You fought back with a closet pole. The police called it a draw, although they gave you a slight lead in the cards. He was the one who went away in the squad car. And you were the one who finally filed the papers.

I wrote this in response to all the questions that people seem to be talking about concerning Rianna's decision to get back together with Chris Brown. I am not condoning her choice, in fact, I suspect that nothing good will come from it. I have personal experience with this. But what I wanted to do is give the reader an inside view of what goes on in the mind of an abused woman. Of course she needs extensive help through counseling. And so did I. That is my point--the solution (LEAVE HIM!) always looks easy when viewed from the outside, but it's not so clear when you are right in the middle of it. All we can do is pray that Rianna finds her way to some form of recovery from this issue. I wouldn't want to read that her boyfriend has roughed up (or worse) that beautiful young lady again.