Category Archives: PTSD
Hugh Massengill’s Recovery Story: Psychiatric Survivor, PTSD, and ACA
I am Hugh Massengill. I identify as a psychiatric survivor, Vietnam Veteran, Child of alcoholism and suicide (mother), and a person with PTSD. I lived for (‘75-’78) years in State and VA mental hospitals diagnosed a Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenic.
Having been told I was severely mentally ill and would be for the rest of my life, I left the hospital and went to a rescue mission where I pretty much sat for five and a half years. I was, periodically, wildly suicidal. It wasn’t an odd intrusive thought, suicide, it was a way out of my unbearable pain. My early family life was remarkably dysfunctional. My finally crumpling under the unbearable emotional pain was labeled insanity, rather than the sanity it really was, PTSD being a very normal reaction to terror.
I am not about sweetness and light. My life was a struggle with pain and isolation. I lived for decadeswithout any sense of belonging to the human race. In the mission I would often spend a week or so without a conversation that lasted longer than four or five words. When I left the Mission, I lived in a small
furnished room. Unlike others of my age, I had no house, furniture, car, wife, kids, job, career, family or friends. After years of isolation, I had lost the ability to hold a conversation, or to really know what I was thinking.
I gained at least fifty pounds in a year, living in the VA mental hospital, on powerful anti-psychotic drugs. I did no exercising. I kept my PTSD in control by isolation, overeating, and daydreaming. Both the State and VA mental hospitals did their best to convince me that I was defective, that I had a genetic mental illness, and would need drugs forever. My self-esteem was in the negative range. When I was in a crowd I would try to get to the edges, or leave, as I didn’t feel I was anything other than a social reject (schizophrenics are crazed killers, don’t you know?).
My mother and I, both terribly traumatized in our respective youths, seemed to be having an unspoken contest to see who would suicide first. She at age56, took her life while I was in the VA hospital system.
And yet, here I am, age 61, alive and, most of the time, happy to be alive. I do a lot of volunteering, and am on several Boards and Commissions. I am on Eugene’s Human Rights Commission, and I am on this current task force looking at the fact that those who go through the mental health system die 25 years before their peers.
If I am getting health, within my limits, it is only because I believed in myself. I woke up one day and realized that I wasn’t “mentally ill” in the traditional sense, and that I would have to do all the work myself, if I wanted to survive. Recovery simply wasn’t built into the mental health system. It was designed by “Big Nurse” to warehouse the very lost and battered; to avoid paying the true expenses of taking care of those with PTSD, though it wasn’t called that at the time.
I give the most credit to the Eugene Rescue Mission where I lived for years. It helped because it wasn’t connected to the mental health system. No one there forced me to take drugs that dulled my mind, no one there labeled me crazy or defective. I had a cot in a large dorm, simple food, and a very simple job folding newspapers for their recycling program.
Let me repeat that: I was aided the most by someone giving me sanctuary from the highly degreed shrinks and their soul-shriveling labels. I lived among equals, men who were equally damaged, distant ghosts unbound by family or relationships.
I fought the VA for years until I got a fairly small pension. Using that, I joined a weight-loss club. Cost me a fortune, but that was the only way to get the 50 pounds off. Very hard to keep it off, but I joined an exercise club, which was expensive, to help me. I went into counseling, as a Vietnam Veteran I was
eligible to use their Vet Center system, which was then a peer-led counseling program. I sat across from someone I grew to trust, for years, relearning how to take my inner world and expose it to the light of conversation. I got off those damn psychiatric drugs, and I stayed off them.
I counsel people today not to do what I did, as I just walked away from the drugs, and for months, had a doubling of my emotional problems. The inner emotional storms were…horrible. But I survived. And I suspect that, though those years took a lot out of me, I bought back a lot of those 25 years. And I do not give much credit to the traditional mental health system for much of my “recovery’. It fought me for years to stay on Thorazine. It refused me a pension, even though I was diagnosed schizophrenic and locked in a VA crisis ward. It did nothing to aid my self esteem. I do have a lot of respect for the Vet Center perspective that sees dysfunction as a natural result of trauma.
I don’t have degree from Yale or Harvard, but I would match the education I received in Norwich State Hospital, Northampton VA Hospital, the Eugene Mission, and years on the street, with the education of any psychiatrist. I sat in the Mission and the hospitals and, within limits, learned what terror and horror and hopelessness felt like. I watched where it came from, how impossible it is get rid of (broken hearts never heal), and above all, I learned that we are remarkably resilient, we human beings, if we get a chance to relax and relearn love. Recovery isn’t about being “cured”, as many of us never had a disease in the first place. It is about relearning to love who we really are, and to accept the daily burden of our struggle as just something we share with most other humans.
Hugh Massengill
H.massengill@comcast.net
PTSD Often Takes Years to be Manifested
As I have written in another post, “Roots of PTSD, Codependency and Addiction“, I was sober for 33 years before my PTSD emerged. I think I was lucky to have such a strong support system when I had the courage to face my fears.
1. In Coping With Life, Tom Davis writes about “Darren DeGraw, Manville and PTSD”:
“Darren, who had also lived in Barnegat, resigned on June 30, 2005 from the Manville force because of the PTSD he suffered from following a 1995 shooting, his ex-wife, Donna DeGraw, once told The Princeton Packet.”
“Even as he suffered, he apparently showed the same leadership spirit he had as a high school student, hoping to revive a community that had a wrecked economy and a population that suffered from a debilitating and deadly illness.”
“But there is only so much a person can do to save themselves, especially when they face the tragedy of depression and trauma that not only affects those around them. Mental illness is often a force bigger than ourselves. It was for my mother, who died of a heart attack in our Point Boro home, in 2003, after suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder for nearly 40 years.”
“For Darren, it was, apparently, a force that – despite the good life he led – was too big to conquer.”
“On Feb. 23, 1995, a man confronted Darren and another officer with a shotgun after a routine traffic stop, according to The Packet. The man stopped his vehicle, near Darren’s police car, and reportedly asked him, “Why are you following me?”
“The man then went back to his truck and took out a 12-gauge shotgun. The Packet reported that Darren and the other officer attempted to drive their police cars away from the man, but Darren’s car was shot at from 30 feet away, shattering his windshield.”
2. From the New York Times, a tragedy that didn’t have to happen about a soldier, David Senft, who had had prior difficulties:
“A gentle snow fell on the funeral of Staff Sgt. David Senft at Arlington National Cemetery on Dec. 16, when his bitterly divided California family came together to say goodbye. His 5-year-old son received a flag from a grateful nation.”
“But his father, also named David Senft, an electrician from Grass Valley, Calif., who had worked in Afghanistan for a military contractor, is convinced that his son committed suicide, as are many of his friends and family members and the soldiers who served with him.”
“The evidence appears overwhelming. An investigator for the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, which has been looking into the death, has told Sergeant Senft’s father by e-mail that his son was found dead with a single bullet hole in his head, a stolen M-4 automatic weapon in his hands and his body slumped over in the S.U.V., which was parked outside the air base’s ammunition supply point. By his side was his cellphone, displaying a text message with no time or date stamp, saying only, “I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry.” (Mr. Senft shared the e-mails from the C.I.D. investigator with The New York Times.) “
“With Sergeant Senft, the warning signs were blaring.”
“The Army declared him fit for duty and ordered him to Afghanistan after he had twice attempted suicide at Fort Campbell, Ky., and after he had been sent to a mental institution near the base, the home of the 101st. After his arrival at Kandahar early in 2010 he was so troubled that the Army took away his weapon and forced him into counseling on the air base, according to the e-mails from the Army investigator. But he was assigned a roommate who was fully armed. C.I.D. investigators have identified the M-4 with which Sergeant Senft was killed as belonging to his roommate.”
“I question why, if he was suicidal and they had to take away his gun, why was he allowed to stay in Afghanistan?” asked Sergeant Senft’s father. “Why did they allow him to deploy in the first place, and why did they leave him there?”
3. From Stop Walking on Eggshells: “High Conflict Relationships Can Led to Stress Disorder”:
Clinical psychologist Dr Joseph M Carver, PhD, who has a number of great articles on his website says in an online discussion that, “Every victim of abuse experiences some, if not multiple, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Carver writes:
[T]hese symptoms linger many years; some for a lifetime. Everyone knows this but it’s rarely bought up…During our period of abuse, the brain collects thousands of memories that contain details of our abusive experiences and the feelings (horror, terror, pain, etc.) made at that time. In what we call “traumatic recollection,” any similar experience in the future will recall the emotional memory of the abuse, forcing us to relive the event in detail and feeling.
Most people think of PTSD as happening only to people who have been in extreme circumstances, such as war veterans. However, in her book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1997) Judith Herman describes a subtype of PTSD she calls complex post traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD).
How Are “The ACOA Laundry List” and PTSD Symptoms Similar?
“The Laundry List” was written by Tony Allen in New York City in 1977. He helped to begin the first ACOA (which became ACA) meeting. It was started to address the healing needed for those of us born as children of alcoholism. I have found grief and loss issues about the child who I could have been. But I live with what Maya Angelou said: “We all did the best we could. And when we knew better, we acted better.”
Tony A. included his list in his book, The Laundry List: The ACOA Experience.
The list is:
a. We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures.
b. We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.
c. We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism
d. We either become alcoholics, marry them, or both, or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfill our sick abandonment needs.
e. We live life from the viewpoint of victims and are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.
f. We have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and it is easier for us to be concerned with others rather than ourselves. This enables us not to look too closely at our own faults.
g. We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.
h. We become addicted to excitement.
i. We confuse love with pity and tend to “love” people who we can `pity” and “rescue”.
j. We have stuffed our feelings from our traumatic childhoods and have lost the ability to feel or express our feelings because it hurts so much (denial).
k. We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.
l. We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings which we received from living with sick people who were never there emotionally for us.
m. Alcoholism is a family disease and we became para-alcoholics and took on the characteristics of the disease even though we did not pick up the drink.
n. Para-alcoholics are reactors rather than actors.
In the past few years, PTSD which has been long recognized as a byproduct of war and severe trauma, is now being used to define some long-time less severe traumas. Last year, at the age of 70, I realized I have lived with PTSD since I was about 5 years of age. I have based most of my major emotional decisions on the core belief that if I don’t expect much emotionally, I can’t get hurt. The reality is that other people are going to do what they choose to do.
For excerpts from 3 PTSD experiences, read “What is PTSD and How Do I Know if I Have It?” Also here is a PTSD test.
The symptoms for PTSD are generally considered to be: From “What is PTSD and How Can We Recognize It?”:
1. From Mark Goulston: PTSD Symptoms: 7 Signs That May Signal PTSD:
1. Feeling Bulletproof:Prior to the trauma, they often felt invulnerable as if nothing could harm them (the way a very wealthy person who can buy anything — and sometimes anyone — can feel all the way to a freshly trained soldier before they enter battle).
2. Horrendous Trauma: There is usually something horrific about the trauma. Horror has a way of destabilizing the acting, feeling and thinking parts of their brains so they can no longer work together. This may explain the use of the expressions: “Wigged out,” “Coming unglued,” “At wit’s end.”
3. Raw Vulnerability: As bulletproof as they once thought they were is as vulnerable as they have turned out to be. There is a belief that they don’t know how they survived the first trauma and an unconscious belief that they wouldn’t survive being re-traumatized. One of the reasons for anniversary reactions.
4. Brittleness: Not being able to find peace outside or inside their life or inside their psyche, leads to a brittleness where anything can set them off. This leads to the heightened startle respond common to people with PTSD.
5. Terror: Inside there is a deeply held belief that any re-traumatization will cause them to shatter and fragment and there is an feeling of impending inevitability that it will happen which creates a state of terror, difficulty sleeping, heavy self-medication (which also dulls ones rational thinking).
6. PTSD Symptoms: Most of the symptoms of PTSD from withdrawing to alcohol and substance abuse to not sleeping (since the experience of and fear of nightmares adds to the terror) are attempts to avoid re-traumatization.
7. Fragility: Feeling on the brink of going from brittle to shattering, fragmenting, losing their mind and never getting it back can cause a person who needs to be in control to take desperate measures. That is because to such a person, losing complete control is a fate worse than death.
