Are you suffering from a form of PTSD? You’re in my prayers! For a while after coming back some things made me “uncomfortable,” such as seeing a cardboard box in or near the road. I never had anything serious, though.
Yes....Complex-PTSD. I didn’t believe it when first diagnosed. But seeing a psychologist weekly, a psychiatrist bi-weekly and my GP monthly - all for six months straight, finally cracked the edges and I became able to see the disorder in all its horrible glory.
About 4 years ago I met my....soulmate (I don’t like that word but, there it is) Neither of us had ever felt the way we felt for each other, before
But one of the things my childhood gave me is the inability to tolerate living under the same roof as someone else. I’m 44 and have never lived with another person. No roommates. No one, ever. Over the three years of our dating, I promised her on several occasions, that we’d move in together - and I wanted to, but I was terrified every time I thought of it.
Finally she had enough and we spit. That was around this time last year. We’ve both been dating but every month or so since the split, One of us breaks down and calls the other. We don’t see each other, we just have the need to know the other is there. In november I said to her, sort of as a sigh, “I don’t know why you put up with this. It’s insane. No one else would deal with it.”
To which, she replied, “Because, I love you.”
And as God is my witness, that was the first time in my 44 years I heard ‘I love you’ from someone - anyone, including family - comprehended what those words meant, and actually believed them.
That devastated me. When I told my psychologist - between sobs in her office at my next appointment - she actually teared up. I can’t be positive but, I believe I cried every single day through christmas. Several of those days it went on for more than two hours straight. That tapered off but I still can’t go in the restaurant we first met or even look at the spot she’d normally park her car and meet when she came over. In January I started noticing other things for the first time like, my small staff appears very loyal to me and there are co-workers who I think, like me.
I’ve been the IT director at my company for 13 years and this is the first time I’d noticed any of these interpersonal dynamics. Anywhere.
I don’t mean to prattle on, and hijack the thread but, holy hell: I can’t imagine any of this type of intensity and defect of personality being the result of a tour in a combat zone, or periphery. My Complex PTSD was created by a childhood that was a non-stop nightmare.
I mean, literally the highpoint of my growing up was just before a day in pre-school when my mother realized I believed I was a girl (I’m gender dysphoric) and berated me for it. Making me realize I was a monster who couldn’t even share a Mother/Son relationship. I learned to lie and suppress everything about myself. And that by itself might not have been bad enough to destroy my life emotionally but by 5th grade I’d been molested by a middle-aged man and in 6th was molested by a married female music teacher who had 3 children in the house where she was dressing me as a girl and having sex with me.
I’m being rude. There’s no point to hijacking this thread, I was merely trying to figure out what it would take to drive a person in combat to the mentality it took my childhood to forge