Let’s Talk Trauma Before We Chat About CPTSD

Trigger warning: This post is about general trauma and I specifically use the example of finding my dead father’s body. If you’re not in the space for this, no hard feelings and come back another time.

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Trauma is a word that has been thrown around a bunch in recent years due both the pandemic and more people seeking therapy because of the pandemic. Like most things that get mainstreamed, a lot of nuance gets left behind and misinterpreted. Having been the recipient of a lot of trauma and now actually having a diagnosis that stems from being traumatized (Complex PTSD) I can speak to this in a weird way as I didn’t even understand the scope of my trauma, what it can be, and how it manifests until fairly recently. When the pandemic first happened I was stunned at everyone calling it traumatic. My mantra in the early days of lockdown was both “I’ve been training for this my whole life” and “as long as I get through this without getting sick or dying, and everyone else I care about does the same…I’m fine. Staying home with my elderly dogs and having time to write is far from the worst thing to happen to me.” I didn’t judge but was candidly very confused by how some people reacted in the early days of the pandemic if they had more or less everything they needed (or at least more than I did). That’s not fair and I see that clearly now (sorry) but this speaks to how I viewed trauma, however incorrect it may be from a technical standpoint. I’m sharing this less than charming reveal to help NOT hide the brushstrokes, but also to say that one can have trauma without understanding what trauma is- having trauma does not make one automatically be an expert in the subject.

Earlier today I read a post on Instagram by a trauma educator saying that people get traumatized not because of what they’ve gone through but by how they went through it. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it because two people could go through the exact same horrific car accident but one could move on just fine from it and the other has nightmares about it for the rest of their life. It’s not a matter of willpower or strength but how things get processed (or not processed) in the brain, what support did they have throughout healing, what value systems did it crush (like if someone truly believed only bad things happen to bad people and then they, a good person, were in a car accident it would mess with their heads), and what other compounding factors were at play. Even in a sea of traumatic events, some incidents will hit harder than others. Sometimes what seems like a “capital T trauma” can have less of an impact than “lowercase t traumas” or other invisible traumas. I am proof of that.

Arguably the event in my life that freaks people out the most, or at least elicits all of the poker faces dropping, is the fact that I discovered my dead father’s body. I spoke of it briefly in this post but what’s wild about this situation is…I do not carry this with me. I carried the events surrounding his death with me and his overall absence, but not the specificity of me finding him. I had several weird death dreams after my dad died, both about him dying and about other people I loved dying, but after a few years those more or less went away. And even while in active grief, I never blacked out or necessarily forgot that I found my dad but I also wasn’t unusually on edge about it or particularly reactive when it was brought up. The absence and void my dad’s death created for me has been way more traumatizing than discovering his body.

I’m not saying I’m unscathed by this event. If I’m watching a movie and it’s realistically portraying someone discovering a dead body of someone they care about (so think good acting, writing, directing and not trauma p0rn that is drama for drama’s sake)…I get a little wrecked. But so do many people when watching scenes like this who have never even seen a dead body. To be fair there are some differences between us if you haven’t been through what I have; when watching realistic movies where someone discovers a loved one who is now deceased I get brought back into the muscle memory of how I felt in that moment when I was 19, screaming, shaking, and being so confused and defeated after making an attempt at CPR on my dad before telling the guy on 911, “my dad’s lips are turning blue. I don’t think it’s working because I think he’s dead...”before trailing off into tears. I’d be lying if I said that was a fun memory to revisit but generally speaking I’m fine hours after the movie ends. Maybe I’m being triggered when watching a movie like that, but it doesn’t ruin my day. If anything, anyone who has lived or traveled with me has been the recipient of some residual trauma responses from what happened because if someone is sleeping very still, soundly, and it’s not clear if they’re breathing…you bet I start investigating if they’re alive and I have annoyed the crap out of them when I eventually woke them up to make sure. Sorry, but also not sorry. If your skin color looks normal but you may be in trouble I’m gonna make sure you can be saved. Like, duh. But besides that, I don’t think I have any other long lasting behaviors that have manifested as a result of discovering my dead father’s body.

So why is this? Am I a cold hearted bitch? Clearly not if I’m actively worried that sleeping people near me sometimes need to be checked out in case they’re dead or dying as I won’t let that happen again on my watch. Am I disassociated from this/have I compartmentalized this and one day it will come back to haunt me? I honestly don’t think so but I know enough to know I don’t know for sure. Maybe the fact that when people sleep too quietly freaks me out is a sign that something isn’t being managed properly from within. But it’s also hard to forget to not put your hand on a burning stove after you’ve been burned, so I’m likely having a normal reaction to abnormal circumstances. That all said, the number one reason why I’m afraid to try psychedelics is because I don’t want to revisit that night and find out that maybe I’m less okay with this experience than I imagined I was. But if I were a betting man, I’d bet I’m okay because I believe I have processed this experience. Let me explain.

After the paramedics and coroner arrived, my dad was taken to the hospital morgue because it was nighttime and I’m assuming that’s where they take people until funeral homes are open the next day. (I was a teenager so I don’t remember the logistics and likely didn’t have much say in it anyway.) My mom was out of town and she had to drive a few hours in the fog and rain (because of course it was rainy with tons of fog the night my dad died) to get to us. We didn’t tell her he died yet because it seemed better to have her navigate the roads with hope over knowing exactly what she was driving back to. Upon arriving we told her what happened and after some time of absorbing it, she wanted to see the body. So we went into the basement of the Doylestown hospital (where the morgue is) to see my dad on a table, but this time he was white as a sheet because he was in a freezer until they pulled him out and had been dead several hours at this point. It wasn’t pleasant to look at, but there was also no ambiguity about what had happened. Same thing for when we did the viewing (with an open coffin) later in the week, and we did a very small private viewing right before his funeral for one of his best friend’s family who couldn’t make it to town until the last minute. I spent a lot of time with my dead father’s body, which to many may seem morbid and terrible, and while I’m not disputing those notions entirely it also made the assignment clear: he was gone and there really wasn’t room for being in denial, deflecting, or other maladaptive coping skills.

Traumatic events happen all of the time and to most (if not) all people. Being traumatized is when the event doesn’t get processed correctly or completely, and/or when coping methods start to become maladaptive and hinder one from living their best life. I only ever felt weird about not being too shook up about discovering my dead dad when telling the story and the person hearing the story was fighting tears at that part. I knew in my bones it was fine and probably even healthy that I wasn’t destroyed by this particular detail of my dad’s death, but occasionally in those moments I’d wonder otherwise. Upon learning about trauma and what it really is and what is really does, I now get that I was forced to process this event and for whatever the reason nothing misfired while processing it.

Before I became more trauma informed, I had a lot of anecdotal evidence that I wasn’t a weirdo for not carrying the experience of discovering my dead father around me. I lived in Colorado for much of my adult life and befriended people who happened to be survivors of multiple mass shootings. One friend in particular was hiding in a closet during a school shooting (you know the one…) remarked that on the anniversary each year her friends who made it safely outside the school would want to rehash, re-ask questions, relive every detail, and would get emotional. She, while always feeling somber and reflective on that day, didn’t necessarily get re-triggered and was less interested in reliving it. She said the difference was “outside the school kids versus inside the school kids” because she felt most who didn’t escape were forced to confront it in real time while those who did escape-while lucky- were experiencing survivor’s guilt, were wondering if their friends were okay in real time, were in the dark about what was happening, and so forth.

Now, I would never say my friend’s perspective is the monolith for all involved; I’m sure some people stuck in the school stayed traumatized longer than her or even got a PTSD diagnosis just as I’m sure some who escaped don’t feel a compulsive need to relive it each year. But I never forgot this sentiment because I related to in my own unique way. Every time I go to a funeral and there’s an open casket, my grief is a tad bit more linear and simple, even if it’s remarkable grief. Grief sucks no matter what but having less doubts, mysteries, and mind games one can play on oneself makes grief that much less complicated. Any friend whose funeral I missed or had a closed casket ended up being a pretty rough grieving experience on me mentally. It was harder to accept and easier to forget that I couldn’t just call them to say hi. Getting it through my thick skull that they were really gone took a helluva lot longer than it did with my dad. Don’t get me wrong, my dad dying was the worst thing to happen to me and I haven’t been the same since (in good and bad ways), but it was also pretty straightforward in many ways. Despite that I fancy myself to be a rebel and oh-so punk rock in spirit, I actually do weirdly well with rules and structure. I think that’s why I was able to process discovering my dad with limited issues.

Trauma isn’t so much about how big or small and how obvious vs invisible it is. You can’t weigh trauma in those terms. It’s about how trauma is processed vs not. And how it’s processed has nothing to do with willpower versus weakness. I can honestly say that most of what I’ve been through has had healthy doses of both “willpower and weakness” and when I was acting “weak” I actually moved through my emotions better and when I practiced having “willpower” it eventually came back to bite me. I literally thought I was doing relatively fine, in life, with all of my collected traumas that had accumulated, until the end of 2020. The pandemic didn’t break me as much as eventually created a tornado that broke my foundation apart, exposing both how weak my foundation was to begin with and all of the contents that were otherwise hidden had been unearthed and once they were there was NO putting Pandora back in that box. The pandemic forced a lot of my shadow feelings and responses to the surface, in some pretty unhealthy ways to be clear, but that is what forced me to seek help because I had run out of trauma responses that worked that were helping me survive. They all lost their magic or proved to be maladapted. Basically, I have been a traumatized person for most of my life and I had no idea until recent years. I just thought I had trauma I had lived through but had somehow managed. Whoops- turns out I did process my dad dying and how I found him but there’s tons upon tons upon tons of traumatizing events that got stuck and informed many parts of my personality, views, and behaviors. But we’ll unpack that all another time. For now I said this in the beginning and I’ll say it again: having been through trauma does not automatically make on an expert in all things trauma.

Nowadays everyone throws around the word trauma and how traumatizing everything is. Most of that is fine with me as it’s good that we’re even talking about trauma to begin with. And I’m never mad when people talk hyperbolically to be funny, so if you say in a tweet that waiting in an airport security line is traumatizing you I get that you’re being silly and I won’t @ you. But still there is a danger with throwing around the word because it does water down the actual experiences of those of us who live life in a traumatized way. It also causes a lot of unfair comparisons and minimizing (and again, I used to be guilty of that and I feel hella bad about that). I heard someone say that we shouldn’t say “we all have trauma” but “we all have pain.” I think I’m mostly aligned with that school of thought. It doesn’t negate anyone’s feelings (I do believe all pain is real) but also gives room for when pain takes on a (maladaptive) life of its own. Pain happens to everyone, but not everyone gets traumatized by the painful experiences they’ve been through. Just like two people can be in the same car accident and have two different reactions. Two people with serious illnesses can also have two very different perspectives and behaviors post illness. Two children can grow up in the same abusive household and have wildly different takes on their family and have differing behaviors and shortcomings. There is no monolith so it’s best to learn how to advocate for your own experiences while leaving space for others to have different reactions and experiences.

Initially I thought the next post on CPTSD would be a FAQ mega post on it, followed by a more metaphorical post on what it feels like to have CPTSD. Those are still coming, but I realized we needed to chat trauma in general before I get into the specificity of CPTSD. If anyone is interested in learning more, there are two books that helped me better understand what trauma is and how it works: Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine and Getting Past Your Past by Francine Shapiro (the founder of EMDR therapy, which this book is also about). I’ll admit both got a little repetitive for me by the end, but I can’t be too mad at that because both books really helped contextualize how the brain deals with trauma and therefore helped me even redefine what trauma really is. I feel like all humans should read books like this, so please check those out or any of the other related resources I recommend here.

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a great weekend. I may upload a few posts tomorrow to play catch up after being sick most of the week or I may just keep ‘em for next week. But I’m working on getting ahead so posts will be daily around here. If you’ve found this at all helpful, a) please come back, b) please feel free to share this on social media) and/or c) follow me on social media (@blairosaurus_rex on most platforms). Thank-you!