I don't feel safe comparing my own memory problems to anybody else's, but for sure, my own memory problems cause way more problems in my own brain than I would have chosen for myself. Those problems are easier to manage since I learned to be compassionately honest with myself about them, but I'd still prefer to just stick a pen drive in my ear. Maybe a frontal lobotomy?

During the most intense of my letting-go-of-denial episodes, I came to think of the denial as a psychic bandage which had been placed over wounds I was not ready, willing and/or able to deal with at the time. Ripping those bandages off hurt, big time, especially the ones which were covering my most infected wounds.

Steadying support while you sort your own, Marah. Hope healing happens here.

Author Kurt Vonnegut's classic Slaughterhouse Five speaks to how surreal PTSD can be for me. The protagonist was a young soldier in World War II in the 1940s. In the novel we meet him twenty years later in the 1960s as a middle aged man. Problem? The events of his 1940s self begin to "leak" into the daily events of his 1960s self through flashbacks. Pretty soon he can't tell if he's coming or going, what was then or what is now. He is truly lost in a surreal experience--not of dreams, but of two realities inside of him all mixed up, that mix him up about going about his daily life.

Sorry if the book review here took too long, but that book really helped me with my own surreal struggle. I got PTSD in the Tupamaro War of Uruguay as a missionary kid in the 1960s, and then twenty years later in the 1980s my PTSD came on strong. The crisis caused my first divorce and sent me to my first counselor in 1985 and I've been in therapy and support groups coping with it ever since.

It was completely terrifying when I went to that counselor in 1985. I got help for depression, and managed through a decade. Then in 1995 my PTSD came on strong again, and I got formally diagnosed with it and not just with depression. That really helped, but I had another PTSD crisis again in 2000 in my second divorce actually landed me in the hospital for 4 days.

In 2010 I had my PTSD come on strong yet again, but this time I was ready for it. My fiancee did break up with me, though, calling me "lazy." I was heartbroken but since I'd had my partner leave both times before when my PTSD had come on strong, sadly enough I was prepared for that, too.

I'd say don't doubt yourself as to whether your husband is right or wrong, just get yourself through this. It's terrifying, but in my experience it passes, though others don't understand. It comes back, too, and it's terrifying again, but it passes again, I've learned.

I wish it didn't do that, come and go in our lives, but apparently that's what living after trauma is like. Surreal is the word for it. However, it's real, not based on a dream or on delusions of ours, we lived through real things that happened to us and that's why we are like we are. There is a basic reason for all of this. So we're here for you because we get that, Marah, you're not alone.

Thanks Muji. I think I I have trouble accepting all this stuff really happened. I hear others talk about their childhood and how kids will be cruel and beat on each other and that’s traumatizing for me because no one ever told me that treatment wasn’t okay. I had to take a parenting class. The instructor talked about his kids like that but he also talked about consequences and how he taught them from those events. Our parents weren’t present until they were and in those circumstances it was ugly.