Anxiety

The Tenth Anniversary… and the unsung hero

Have you ever realized your life consists of specific time frames? 

Before I was married. After I was married. 

Before I had children. After I had children. 

When I was a kid. After I left home. 

Hopefully you get the point. These frames of times can bring a feeling of joy or pain. We also use these as a reference of before and after especially when telling a story. 

I have a few frames that detail my life and today marks the tenth anniversary of a moment in time that changed so much about how I function in life. 

January 20, 2011 started just like most mornings. I sat down, had my coffee and quiet time. The weather was sunny and chilly on that day, very much like it is today. I rushed off to Nashville ten years ago with no thought that today would be the day that someone thought I was a threat and needed to be silenced. 

My Facebook status from today ten years ago was this. 

Thank you all for the prayers. I look like Rocky at the end of the fight scene. Pray that I do not have to have surgery on Wednesday and that my sight will not be affected. 

That was all I was worried about at that point in time. No surgery and my sight. The letters PTSD weren’t even part of my vocabulary, let alone the word Anxiety. 

For those who have followed this decade old saga knows that I have talked about all different aspects of it. And have even celebrated victories of healing. But for this anniversary I want to share a story that hasn’t had much attention and is still something that we have to overcome, even today. 

After the attack, and when the diagnosis of PTSD was given and the anxiety started to rear its ugly head, I, the victim was offered support and counseling. My husband, strong and brave spent the next few years being my over-protector because I was never sure when and where the triggers would happen. 

Then the healing started and I would venture out more and more by myself. I had such a great support system and my husband was extremely happy that I had been healed, but when a crime has been committed there are the victims, and then what I call the secondary victims.   

My husband, a secondary victim has silently dealt with this for ten years. He went from having lunch, planning a mission trip to being guilt ridden that he should have been there to protect me. 

He has felt anger that someone actually took their hands and hurt his bride. His anger wanted to find this person and hurt them as well. With all the support I received there was no one to talk to or work through his feelings. Mine always came first. 

Now that we are a decade past that dreadful phone call he received, I wish I could say he has been freed.  On Monday this week, he woke up with unexplained anxiety. I had it as well. It wasn’t debilitating, it was just present. That afternoon I had to write the date for something and it hit me that this was the anniversary week. I explained that to Rob and just a few minutes later he told me that the anxiety had lifted.

Your subconscious does funny things like that and you may go hours or even days without realizing where the anxiety, anger etc stemmed from. 

So today as I celebrate the fact I am still here on this earth, my prayer is for all the secondary victims who haven’t found healing. I pray even if it’s as simple as someone to talk to, they will reach out or someone will reach out to them. 

And I thank God for my hero… my husband who has sacrificed so I could heal.

Traditions and trip ups- Not allowing PTSD, anxiety and depression dictate your holiday.

There was a couple who had recently gotten married and were celebrating their first holiday by having everyone over for dinner.

As she was preparing the ham she cut off the ends and placed it in the pan to cook. Her husband walked in and saw the ends sitting there, he asked: “why did you cut the ends off?”

“I don’t know, it’s just the way my mom always did it.”

As the ham was cooking the young wife calls her mother, to ask why she cut off the ends of the ham.

Her mother chuckles, and says, “because I didn’t have a pan big enough to cook the ham”.

Traditions and trip ups- Not allowing PTSD, anxiety and depression dictate your holiday.

 

In 2011 I was the target of a gang attack. As a result of the attack, I was offered counseling, and therapy.  During this time, I was diagnosed with PTSD, but I was also opening lots of worms from my childhood and the abuse I endured as a teenager.

Through all of this, I realized that I was allowing traditions to trip up my holidays by triggering my PTSD, anxiety and depression.

So where did this start:

Growing up I used to love Christmas. Christmas was filled with snow, lots of it.

It was filled with a fresh tree and lots of homemade sugar cookies with homemade frosting.

It also was more importantly filled with Grandma, Grandpa, aunts, uncles and cousins.

You would wake up to see what Santa brought you, then rush to grandmas house.

There was piano playing, singing and the cousins would get our ice skates and head to the swamp to skate on the pond.

There were no cell phones or technology just the outdoors and a “be home by dusk”.

The evening was finished with homemade chocolate malts.

Then my childhood as I loved, came to a crashing  HALT!

My mom and dad got divorced, my mom remarried and my grandmother (who I did EVERYTHING with) at age 55 was diagnosed and died of leukemia in less than a month.

Now, Christmas looked like this:

No laughter, No one hurrying to grandmas, and to top it off pack your bags before we go because your dad is coming to get you.

It went from bad to worse….fast forward to my getting married and moving 600 plus miles away.

We went home once and never went back. I couldn’t explain it, but I had no desire to be pulled here and there.

Now that I have kids who have kids, I so badly wanted to replicate my memories of the “Norman Rockwell” Christmas traditions that I grew up with, but that came at a price…my anxiety and depression were at an all time high and worse yet, I could not wait for January 1st so this “Scrooge like” person would go away.

Epic fail every year. Again not knowing that I was allowing my yearning for a tradition to trip up my holidays by triggering my PTSD, anxiety and depression.

So what started the change was 3 years ago…. We finally decided to go home for Christmas.  The kids all had places to go and be so we went home to Michigan.

On the drive back  home to Tennessee,  I told my husband we can go home again, but NOT during the holiday season. That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks.  As I was trying to recreate traditions and make everyone happy during the holiday, I was made painfully aware that I CANT do that for my own well-being.  And I have to be OK with NOT being at every family function or worse yet trying to recreate the tradition.

Two years ago, we became empty-nesters, and I had to make a conscious decision to no longer allow the traditions to trip me up, become full of anxiety, fall into deep depression and a SCROOGE.

I had to give myself permission to start over with NEW TRADITIONS.

So here are a few ideas I have come up with:

Don’t keep yourself so busy that you don’t have to think about the holiday

Do come up with new things for you and your family to do

Acknowledge the holidays, but be OK with the change that you want to do

Don’t feel guilty for NOT doing a tradition; especially if that tradition creates a trigger for your PTSD, anxiety and or depression.

Realizing that boundaries are a key part of keeping your sanity

Learning what your triggers are and saying “NO” to those things that flare up your anxiety, PTSD etc

Start NEW traditions.

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As a woman who speaks life into women all day, why can we advise, instruct others to change and live life free, but we have a hard time granting ourselves the same freedom?

 

 

Surviving Church with PTSD and Anxiety

The last month or so I have left church with almost this panic attack, anxiety feeling.

My inner most being has said “suck it up cupcake, it’s church you are secure.”

Even as I am writing this the tears are flowing and the anxiety I feel is about a 9.5 on a 10 scale and I have been home from church for an hour.

I don’t like feeling like this~ the girl who loves serving~ who loves to teach~ is floundering trying to figure out how to get involved and subside this emotional roller coaster of anxiety and panic attacks.

As I talked with my amazing husband, we decided we would first try a different service time. The 9am service is not as packed and maybe the overflowing service has triggered something. So today we attended the 9am service. I did well, but as the service let out, and we were leaving the anxiety started to fill me again.

We head home,but first we need to stop at Kroger. My husband realizes that my arms are folded and I am walking with much more of a purpose. “I’m fine”, is my reply. All the while my inner being is saying: “as long as you don’t say much, keep busy, you won’t lose it.”

Yeah, I make it through Kroger. Now home. My husband comes over to me, wraps his loving arms around me and starts to pray, I start to cry.

I am so tired of feeling like this. This cloud. This anxiety. This very easy could become a dark depression if I let it.

So I sit down and start writing, the tears flowing as I pray “God, something’s gotta give, and I am afraid it’s going to be me.”

I start to let my mind wander.

These are the words I come up with:

The accident

The man who didn’t fit in

The bathroom

No more happy place

So the first word: Accident (totaling the motorcycle on June 28)

Adding additional Trauma to someone who already deals with PTSD, and their go to behavior is to stay busy so you don’t have to feel…is not a recipe for a beautiful wedding cake, but a recipe for disaster.image

I have realized that growing up, when things were bad at home, I kept myself busy. I figured if I just locked myself in my room, the bad would happen, and I would just walk out when things were done blowing up. Again not a healthy way to cope with real life and feelings.

Second word was: Man who didn’t fit in

Right aconquering PTSDfter the accident and right after the Chattanooga shootings, there was a gentleman who came to our church services. I did not recognize him. His clothing choices, did not fit the 90 degree weather we were having, and seeing we are in the suburbs, having this person being someone of the homeless population that I minister to in the Nashville area, wasn’t even on my radar. The whole service long my anxiety was heightened, again to the panic attack mode. I wasn’t even safe in the church building, was my thought.

During this time, I had started using a different set of bathrooms that were off the beaten path. There was never a waiting line before or after church. Here is where the issue was, this was the bathroom, in which right after the attack (January 2011) I found myself in when I started bleeding from my nose and it was so bad that we had to call the doctor to make sure everything was ok. So, now every time I walked into this bathroom, I immediately went back to that night, which went back to the attack.

And then my happy place.

My happy place was destroyed through words of discouragement.

So why did I write about this. First because my therapy is writing. It may not fix all my anxiety and panic attacks today but getting it out and verbalizing it allows for satan to not take up any more residence in my thoughts.

Secondly, I know I am not the only person who deals with PTSD, anxiety and panic attacks. Not everyone has such an amazing spouse who is in-tune to your feelings and can give you a safe place to think, vent and strategize. If you are that person who does not have a special someone where your feelings are safe, please do not let this anxiety, panic attacks become a deep dark depression please, please talk to someone. Don’t let it engulf you.

And thirdly, even though church is supposed to be a safe place, it can also hold a lot of triggers for people.
My question to myself is how am I going to work through this? How am I going to control it verses letting it control me?

You see having these issues don’t define you unless you give them permission to.