One day I noticed a member's name and it was "I had no Idea", and wow did that resonate with me, to the core.

I always thought I managed to survive alot of the bad things I experienced in my childhood and even my life, it never occured to me that I was "hurt" the way I have come to understand it in experiencing PTSD.

For myself looking back through PTSD, I can see that most of my life from my earliest memories when I could bearly even walk, I became a hypervigilant child. It has been very hard for me to look back on it all with finally understanding hypervigilance and anxiety and what "abuse and disfunction and victim mentality" really means. When I suffered such a sudden and big loss and I broke, I was so hurt that I thought, "my god no one is ever going to understand how deep this really goes". Through all that troubled past I had developed a certain kind of strength, and I was often admired for it, often questioned "how do you know so much?". Even in therapy when I have talked about the way I see things, I am constantly asked if I read this book or that book as if what I knew was something that some other person had written about. Well, I didn't read any of those books, I lived it and did a lot of figuring out "whys" on my own. I just thought that that is what most people do, "live and learn" and grow past alot of things that might be bad or threatening to them. And the truth is, alot of people do just that, they learn as they go really. Only some people have a more functional and safer family environment growing up then others do. Some people don't experience CSA from an early age, they actually have a safe childhood where they don't live from day to day in constant fear somehow.

My husband was always asking me, "Why are you always looking over your shoulder somehow, why can't you just ignore these things and go about your own life?" And I honestly never thought that my being "aware" like I was was something "not normal".
My husband also was constantly saying to me "you know too much" and I could not understand why others didn't recognize certain things like I did. My T tells me that I am sooo strong, but the "why" I am like that isn't a pretty picture really.

Yes, it is quite the challenge to revisit the "whys" that you just didn't know about and have to slowly learn how to see what it all meant and then slowly learn how to finally think about it in a way where you can move forward and function again. Yes, it does feel like a big "relearn".

It is important to make sure you don't "self blame" while you do this either, but instead to be patient and very forgiving of yourself. It is important to understand you did the best you could with what you knew at the time and that you "did" survive it all even though it hurt you more than you realized it did. It is ok to grieve it and even get angry too, but very important to remember you were only human too.

Open Eyes