I just got back from Minnesota and it was one of the worst visits anywhere in my life.   That includes when I went to my abusive parents' home for Christmas in 2010 and my addle-brained elderly father, who was my abuser in childhood, punched me in the face because gay people went to my church, a church states away that he never attended and whose congregation I never discussed with him one way or the other.  (!?) 

My trip was supposed to be a vacation visiting my old friend, my college room mate Class of 1979.  We've kept in touch because he works for the US government as a scientist in Minnesota, and comes to DC.  I moved near DC five years ago, so every business trip to DC he visited me, too.  I didn't visit him in Minnesota until now, and therefore as our friendship renewed in the last five years I hadn't seen her for a long time.

My friend's wife has always been a handful, always needing to be the center of attention.  Through my friend, her husband, she had heard about my PTSD diagnosis.  Now before my visit to reconnect with her, she decided she had PTSD, too.  It was something about an uncle that touched her when she was a kid, but--and on this she insisted for some reason--just once.  She also decided before my visit that she did EMDR and that it magically cured her PTSD completely. 

So the table was set for her to berate me when she saw me again about why I wasn't cured, too, so I wouldn't talk about PTSD and have her husband--my friend that I've known for years before they were married--to myself at all.  I'd been able to negotiate her manipulations before over the years.  This time a policeman shot a man blocks away from the home I was visiting and the nation, rightly so, got in an uproar.  Therefore, the whole neighborhood this time was in an uproar nonstop over a shooting like the one an officer overseas attempted on me twice, only to have his gun jam twice.  

The parallels between this fatal shooting last week where I visited and my own near fatal shooting experience triggered me over and over.  That made her angry because it brought me attention instead of focusing attention on her and how this shooting in her neighborhood meant that the topic of police shootings was now all "hers."  So she manipulated the situation so that she could find a chance literally to tell me that I was too "heavy" if I mentioned anything about a police officer putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger, too.  She said it triggered her PTSD, which had been cured before my arrival.

But then within the hour of demanding my silence about police abuse overseas that involved me, she literally put a sign up in her yard about "her" shooting that just happened last week.  From then on for 3 days she talked about "her" shooting.  Mind you, nobody pointed a gun at her ever,  This shooting was "hers"because it happened recently in her neighborhood.  I was not supposed to mention my PTSD, but she talked about how cured she was from hers non-stop while talking about this shooting in her neighborhood in the house with me, her husband, on the phone, with neighbors, at church, in a march she joined in on, and in a vigil she attended. 

She has always competed for attention in all ways.  30 years ago before getting married to my friend she had a rival for my friend's affection, and during this trip she brought the "other" woman up as a bitter rival, still holding a grudge.  After getting married she competed with her own kids for their father's attention.  They both live far away out of state now.  She always competed with me at every visit before I moved near DC and I saw her husband more in these last five years.  Her problem was that I knew her husband first, before she did.  We had been college roommates, so I had been first, and that meant I "won" and she "lost" as far as who knew better.

Now she competed with my about "her" police incident that just happened to someone else in her neighborhood versus "my" police incident, that actually happened to me and gave me PTSD, one of many traumatic incidents I survived overseas living under a dictatorship for a decade.  She not only competed with "my" old PTSD versus "her" new PTSD.  "Her" new PTSD was better than "my" old PTSD because she was now cured in just months from "diagnosis" to EMDR she did.  That beat "my" old PTSD, which is not cured.  That's because according to her I'm "negative" and "heavy" and talk about it too much and haven't just done EMDR like she has to just get it fixed.  Everything is a competition she must win, including PTSD and its treatment.  There is no win-win for her when it comes to attention.  If someone else gets attention, it means she lost attention, and that can't happen. 

She even pumped me for information to know what I said to her pastor after church on Sunday to make sure I didn't get more attention from him than she did.  The NY Times took a picture of us at church that they printed, and she was relieved that it put her in the foreground and me in the background with her husband in the middle.  She actually pointed that out.  It bothered her that her pastor was a minister and that I was one, too, because I was a hospital chaplain, and that he gave me his address so I could write him a note later.  For her pastor and me to communicate directly by having a chat on Sunday or, worse, by writing each other letters as colleagues later without her as a go between was for her to "lose" and not to "win" the attention game.

So my visit to Minnesota day after day for the past week was to cope with her talking constantly about this sad police abuse case in her neighborhood, while forbidding that I talk about having survived one once myself.  That triggered me all daily day after day without any outlet to the point that I had PTSD panic attacks constantly, trouble breathing.  In  my constant anxiety I threw up one night, I had diarrhea, I had insomnia, and I even had bladder control problems and had to change my underwear for it, which was humiliating.  It got to the point where I wondered if I might commit self harm before I got to leave to fly back home.  That's when I asked you all at DS PTSD for help, and you posted support that got me to where I could get on the plane for home.

That woman may be a lot of nice things to a lot of people, but she was bad to me.  As a former nurse and as someone who just played around with a self-diagnosis of PTSD before I got there, she knew it, too.  In her treatment of me on this trip, she was just bad.  May God have mercy on her.  I'm just glad I got home safe.  I am certainly never, ever visiting my friend in his home in Minnesota again, just here when he comes alone to DC.  She's so toxic to me that I'll see him somehow without her or not at all.

Thanks for supporting me to get me home, and thanks now that I'm home for letting me vent.

Muji