I'm probably not the only one here with this type of PTSD. I had the kind of life with many traumas, early age, middle years and so on.

Inspite of all that, even with considerabe anxiety, I functioned fairly well. Put myself through college, majored in social work, graduated and started to work in the field.

At one point, I even had my own counseling practice, which was quite successful. I have a happy and healthy marriage. No kids of my own--but plenty of children that I helped raise.

I had some issues--anxiety attacks, depression, but they were manageable. I'm a Buddhist meditator, and my meditation was one of my coping strategies.

Then I moved seven years ago to be near my Buddhist teacher. I went into long term Buddhist retreat at home, and I saw my Lama every three months or so for consultation.

Two years into the retreat, my Lama started his own long term retreat, and gave me new, more advanced practices to try. At the same time, his own retreat boundaries were strict, which meant I would not be able to talk to him directly.

In the meantime, my outer boundaries were getting increasingly porous. We were having problems with a neighbor over shared water rights, and ingress and egress. My wife, (lesbian partner of 24 years, we were civilly married and married in the Buddhist monastery) who was not in retreat fended off alot of the strife, but it increasingly interfered in my sense of being able to meditate and stay in retreat.

Eventually, I had to come out of retreat. The neighborhood more or less exploded with these neigbhors--there were a series of violent espisodes that I was aware of and tried to intervene in--neigbors were engaged in domestic violence and child abuse and I had talks with him, which they weren't open to. This man punched and threw his wife to the ground, kicked the dog, which broke the dogs ribs, intimidated his wifes father, picked her three year old up by his ear, etc etc. He also got into a fist fight with another neighbor--they were all drunk--the man he fought with was in his fifties, this fellow broke a chair over him, had him on the ground choking him. It is no wonder the older man took off after him with a gun and shot up his car. It is the older man who ended up being charged with a crime. The older man was a former county commissioner.

I reported the child abuse. The violence from the neighbors started to spill over onto my property. The neighbor increasingly shouted verbal abuse and slurs, vandalized my property and showed up at all hours drunk and complaining--at one point my wife invited him in and he shouted and threatened us both--I advised him to sit down and lower his voice or leave. He refused, he wanted to get me to fight with him.

I called the police but by the time they showed up, he had gone home and it was a case of him making mutal claims against us.

The antagonism continued. He locked our mutual gate, making me call the sheriff to get access to my own home. The neighbor vandalized the property, stole items from our home, and threatened me with violence continually trying to get me to fight with him. Shoving me, shouting, and so on.,

Finally, he met me at the gate in a rage with a pitchfork in his hands, he kept moving closer and closer and stabbing the pitchfork into the ground, screaming expletives and homophobic slurs. He finally lost it and shoved me hard enough to send me sailing. I was injured in the fall, and we called the police for the fourth time. I wanted him arrested. But the police told me if I asked for his arrest they would have to arrest me, that he was counter claiming that I assaulted him. I never did in any of the occassions when he was violent. But I was working a new job as a counselor--ironically enough--for a program working with mentally ill and substance abusing offenders.

I was two weeks into the new job--my boss saw the bruises and insisted I press charges. Which I did. Here I was in a brand new, highly stressful and challenging job and my bosses impression is "I have personal problems at home".

I had to emergency move from my house to another location, sell the old house, buy a new house, get a restraining order, hire a lawyer all while engaged in the most challenging job I'd ever had.

The new boss was very controlling--ex-military--and unbeknownst to me when I started the job--homophobic. He had already filed a sexual harassment/disrimination suit against the Clinical Director because she was a lesbian and he thought he should be getting promoted. Apparently, that's how he was promoted. She was due to retire and left about two months after I started. Everyone was sorry to see her go--she was highly skilled and compassionate.

Short wrap up--I started having problems on the job--flashbacks, anxiety attacks, depression--what was happening was all that childhood abuse that I thought I'd taken care of was resurfacing in the light of the recent trauma.Three weeks before my one year probationary period, I was 'let go without cause'. They hired a less experienced, less expensive, former clerk, who happened to be male.

All of this is grist for the mill, I've been working on myself intensively in weekly EMDR therapy for a year, taking an anti-depressant, and using occassional anti-anxiety when things get bad.

I have good support from my loving wife/partner and my Buddhist community--but I'm still not working.