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.
I picked up my PTSD near 20 years ago. Since then my life has been wracked with debilitating panic attacks. I was a shut in for a couple years, but that made things worse. Through all of this I raised a daughter...
It could not have been the best childhood, but I did the best I could. We spent our summers at Renaissance Faires and winters at SciFi conventions. My house was the teen hang out (no sex, drugs, smoking, or alcohol allowed) and she always had a horse to ride.
In all that time though, she learned to watch out for me. Help me though what I could not do myself.
Then she fell in with a crowd that if I could find I, as a US Army Vet, would hunt down and kill without a seconds hesitation. She dated a married man who was 20 years her senior who convinced her to dress like a slut, be rude, and gain mannerisms that isolated her from all of her other friends.
With no other way to stop her downward spiral, hubby and I worked it out with his mom that after she finished her Associated Degree, she should move 1000 miles away to live with her and take advantage of the tuition discounts CA gives to the kids of disabled vets.
She has been gone for 8 days. Not four hours of daytime goes by that she is not on the phone with me about how miserable she is. Her 80 year old grandmother is not about to let her dress like a slut, nor be rude. She misses her horse, but has to wait until she has a job to have her horse sent to her.
I know that she is going through culture shock. Going from the VERY liberal Seattle area to conservative central CA is like night and day. Right now there is no coming home as hubby and I are in the process of packing our house as it has to be demolished due to black mold. We are looking at living in either the garage or a motorhome until we can get a new house built.
But knowing WHY she is struggling does not help when she is on the phone, on the edge of tears and all I can think of is that my baby is hurting and if this fails she will run to that A-hole who wrecked her life in the first place.
So I have started to dread the sound of her voice. I can't stop shaking, can't stop crying. It takes me two or three days to get all the way out of a panic attack, but I have been having them two or three a day for a week now. I don't think she has stopped long enough to think through what she is doing to me.
It is weird as in the past she was the first to jump in between me and anyone who would 'stress' at me to prevent or mitigate my panic. Now she is the cause.
My only good thought in all of this is A-hole would not loan her $5 for something she wanted to buy her last weekend here, there is no way he will drive 1000 miles to go get her, let alone provide room and board. As she does not have a job yet, and grandma would take back the Jaguar convertible she is currently driving should she try to drive back to him.
thanks for letting me vent. It is a horrible place to not want to hear the voice of my daughter - but every time I get off the phone with her I shake for hours...
yadlim and my Misha
It could not have been the best childhood, but I did the best I could. We spent our summers at Renaissance Faires and winters at SciFi conventions. My house was the teen hang out (no sex, drugs, smoking, or alcohol allowed) and she always had a horse to ride.
In all that time though, she learned to watch out for me. Help me though what I could not do myself.
Then she fell in with a crowd that if I could find I, as a US Army Vet, would hunt down and kill without a seconds hesitation. She dated a married man who was 20 years her senior who convinced her to dress like a slut, be rude, and gain mannerisms that isolated her from all of her other friends.
With no other way to stop her downward spiral, hubby and I worked it out with his mom that after she finished her Associated Degree, she should move 1000 miles away to live with her and take advantage of the tuition discounts CA gives to the kids of disabled vets.
She has been gone for 8 days. Not four hours of daytime goes by that she is not on the phone with me about how miserable she is. Her 80 year old grandmother is not about to let her dress like a slut, nor be rude. She misses her horse, but has to wait until she has a job to have her horse sent to her.
I know that she is going through culture shock. Going from the VERY liberal Seattle area to conservative central CA is like night and day. Right now there is no coming home as hubby and I are in the process of packing our house as it has to be demolished due to black mold. We are looking at living in either the garage or a motorhome until we can get a new house built.
But knowing WHY she is struggling does not help when she is on the phone, on the edge of tears and all I can think of is that my baby is hurting and if this fails she will run to that A-hole who wrecked her life in the first place.
So I have started to dread the sound of her voice. I can't stop shaking, can't stop crying. It takes me two or three days to get all the way out of a panic attack, but I have been having them two or three a day for a week now. I don't think she has stopped long enough to think through what she is doing to me.
It is weird as in the past she was the first to jump in between me and anyone who would 'stress' at me to prevent or mitigate my panic. Now she is the cause.
My only good thought in all of this is A-hole would not loan her $5 for something she wanted to buy her last weekend here, there is no way he will drive 1000 miles to go get her, let alone provide room and board. As she does not have a job yet, and grandma would take back the Jaguar convertible she is currently driving should she try to drive back to him.
thanks for letting me vent. It is a horrible place to not want to hear the voice of my daughter - but every time I get off the phone with her I shake for hours...
yadlim and my Misha
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Hey all, i know its been quite awhile since i posted on here. Its been a summer all right. Its been something else........... You know how they say not to open the can of worms? Well a few months ago i decided to find out what my due date would have been for my first baby, the one conceived by r***. My baby would have been due on March 4th of 2006. They would be 20 years old. I was R**** on June...
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My day...today...misplaced my debit card...didn't realize it until I got to the register after shopping to a full cart. Used a different debit card and pulled apart everything looking for missing debit card before I left parking lot. Got home, dropped keys. So now I have a missing debit card, missing keys. A full cartload to unload and put away. I got everything put away.Dumped purse for a...
THe leading cause of mental illness is family.
That said, not much else but gentle healing vibes to you all, and you can always do what I used to do when my sis would call me. She never did unless she needed something and as she was one of my abusers, I just set the phone down, put it on speaker, and went on with my task while saying "Uhhuh" every couple minutes so she'd know I was there, but I wasn't actually listening. I was reading a book, usually. Horrible, but it kept me sane.
Yadim... I had the opportunity to have children, but I chose to not do so for fear they would experience what I experienced in life...
So many of the people I know experience such powerlessness regarding their children and the choices they make...
While I cannot say I can relate, I do hear what you are saying...
I am grateful you chose to vent... I am sorry for your pain...
Take good care of yourself at this fragile time... And, know you are not alone...
Hope the venting helped. In landfill design terms, I compare it to methane emission control. Whatever the analogy of choice, getting it out really does seem to help.
Welcome to the forum. I look forward to seeing you around.
Lots of love and warm thoughts being sent to you!
If I did not love and like her, I would not care. But she is my baby and always will be.
LOL, arfire, the randomness of the universe is enough that there are only so many possibilities out there that many have to be repeated. That means it is actually statistically possible there is an exact double somewhere on the planet! LOL - even your wolf icon makes me think of when I had a pet wolf in the house, which was not that long ago!
Anyway, I have not panicked since I vented this morning! Now to just get my pain under control and I might get something done today.
Yadlim and my not so little bear Misha