Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.
Hello, Friends! I look forward to engaging on this site daily. I am living a mostly-reclusive life, by choice, right now. But when I connect here, with others who understand what it feels like to experience extreme trauma and to work to overcome the aftermath and achieve life balance, I know that I am not alone.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my close friends, Angelika and Reinhard. They were originally my clients, when I owned my advertising agency. They had just come here from Germany in 1996, and barely spoke English. I helped them with their marketing, and they built their business here into a multi-milliion dollar distribution firm within only a few years. Our professional relationship led to a lasting friendship.
I became close to their oldest son, Michael. He was a genius, and like many, lost in this material world. He was confused about his gender and his sexuality. He was an alcoholic, and occasionally used drugs. His parents sent him to rehab a few times, and he landed in the nut house at one point where he got involved with a gay hustler who ended up moving in with him and abusing him terribly- beating him and robbing him.
He was trying to pull himself together, when suddenly he couldn't breathe. At the hospital they found he had Stage-4 lung cancer. His parents sent him to Mexico for an experimental treatment that cost $60K. But when he came home he had to begin chemo anyway. He didn't last long, and died just short of his 41 st Birthday- two years ago today.
Because of my closeness to Michael, his parents have become very close to me. I am grateful for their friendship, and they have been very generous and good to me. We come from such different worlds- (my father came from Orthodox Jews who were fleeing the Holocaust) -while Reinhard was a soldier in the German military. It is amazing to me how God brings us together with people who we would ordinarily never expect to encounter. I believe this is Divine Intervention- providing us the opportunity to grow spiritually and embrace others without prejudice.
Thoughts???
Germany...the US...(Jews)...all believing in a god, and coming together.
The US and (atheist) Russia...going on for decades more of cold war....
The Holocaust (never forget)...6 million Jews killed. (And 5 million forgotten atheists, communists, homosexuals, misfits...)
I can CLEARLY see how important this belief is to you. And I think that that is WONDERFUL.
Being atheist...has been wonderful (and saved my life) for me too.
If you ever have "doubts"...I will happily refer you back to your beliefs.
If I have "doubts"...I hope that you will happily refer me back to MY non-beliefs too.
Because Pascal's Wager...created a lot of PTSD. And if religion is ever a trigger for me...there's a reason. I'm not "spiritually immature", a "child", I haven't "fallen away", I won't change my mind "after the baby is born". (These are real life things said to me, not once, but hundreds of times, by people who clearly had good intentions, but were only concerned in promoting their own beliefs...at the expense of my well being.
The choices are to 1) hide, and be silent in the back of the church...in fear of being labeled one of those "new atheists", 2) say something...and be told how spiritually weak I am, 3) be dismissed as "well you're only atheist because you've been HURT"...that's the great (sarc) one, because then theists are free to say whatever they want to hurt me...catch-22.
Again, I am HAPPY that you have found comfort in your beliefs. I really am. I'm also glad that I have my own.
It really hurt me deeply to have taken my partner proudly to all my home places in Montevideo and Buenos Aires and have the hospitality rejected. I was stunned. We'd gone to the best restaurants, to the opera, the red carpet had been rolled out. Yet it was all considered too different.
It nearly killed me to realize how different half of me was. I really had to work hard on embracing my whole self in therapy after that. Barbara Johnson's book made all of the difference to me. From that book I went on to read others like it, and to meet in person one of the authors of one of those other books like hers. It really saved me, quite literally. When my spouse left because of my difference and divorce proceedings began, I spent 4 days in the hospital, I was so broken by the high price of difference I was paying.
It didn't save my marriage, sad to say. My spouse turned out to enjoy foreigners, just not foreigners like me who had a different language background.
That meant choosing a Scottish coworker of mine over me. He was foreign and interesting, yet he did not speak a different language.
I got through it, though, by embracing my own different two cultures and my two different languages within me. I'm following that up now by being here in Mexico planning my retirement in 2 years.
I was raised in both Mexico and Uruguay.
I'm choosing Mexico for retirement because it's close enough to have both my childhood culture yet close enough to the USA to return to visit my US friends, too. I just did that trip back to the States and back this week in the middle of my summer in Mexico to test out how that would work. It worked.
All so as to embrace both differences. I really appreciate how I'm accepted here at DS PTSD, starting with the nickname "Muji." It's the nickname people here gave me from my Daily Strength username "mujicaptsd." Uruguay's President Mujica from 2010-2015 came out of the closet about his own PTSD and gave me the courage to be willing to come out about it, too, and be different.
I love being called "Muji" here, Stormy. Thanks, y'all.