Do you now feel life is much more fragile?

We used to argue all the time, people used to get sick, we would move, life was in a flow, a kind of violent flow sometimes. Then when my sibling's psychiatric illness hit and was hospitalized and when I came face to face with that helplessness, I was traumatized. That was years ago. Yet I have remained depressed. Part of is that I feel like I'm walking on eggshells, that life is so fragile. When my sibling was feeling suicidal and psychotic, I felt like our connection was completely broken, almost as if I was dealing with a wild animal. On top of it, my parents who had their own stuff going, did not act the way I had always believed they would. My dad somehow needed to attend to some "urgent" business overseas a couple of times and my mom who seemed more involved and more caring was also more damaging as out of her own fear and shame she lied to doctors about important thingsand other times just manipulated my sibling as an attempt to gain some control over the situation which only made the paranoia and psychosis worse.

So now I knew two things, that if my sibling had not gone to the hospital that day with all the suicidal thoughts, I could as easily been telling the story of a "successful" suicide attempt. It's just like that. Like walking on a tightrope. Like you are never aware of it till something bad happens and then you look down and see the abyss and are horrified, that bad things CAN and DO happen including happening to YOU PERSONALLY. And secondly I knew that if things got bad for someone, like if illness or disability of some sort hit ME, I could not count on my parents. Heck, I could even do well to distance myself from them. That frightened me to my core, that the very people I had always trusted and wanted to please could actually damage me or leave me unprotected when I'm down.

What's worse is that it's no longer about coming to terms with one bad incident, as if you were a kid and hurt your knee and go have ice cream and feel all better...the end. No, now your whole world is different, it's shown you its ugly side, the God I believed in half-heartedly, God who would come to my rescue if things got REALLY BAD, also left me in that moment. Surely months of hospitalization and fear and a chronic psychiatric illness are not as bad as someone actually dying but I felt like God still let me down because of all the suffering I had to endure and I felt it went beyond my limit which is of course why I developed PTSD.

So now I see the world as fragile. I was recently reading an inspirational book and one section the author mentioned how plants can live and grow even in most difficult circumstances, something one can use as inspiration...but I, unlike my past self which was ready to accept inspirational views, immediately debated the conclusion: But not all plants, probably weeds, aggressive unfeeling plants! I once looked at my lab results and it frightened me. Every single of those values could go down or up by a tenth and I could have some new illness. What is keeping all this together? Sometimes I wonder if it would not be unusual if one day I'm walking and I just literally fall apart, bones, muscles, heart, skin, all. Like a roadkill I saw the other day and disturbed me for a few days. That disemboweled rat no more deserved its fate or suffering than did I or my family or my sibling. It's a dangerous world out there.

What is worse is I think I can never regain that, well, innocence or wholeness or sense of belonging I felt before. Not that life was perfect. I was surviving. Parents argued, siblings fought, and my mom has a regressed type of personality and can be child-like at times and raging manipulator other times, and often I was frightened of her moods. A new venture my dad had convinced us as a family to undertake turned out to be a disaster on many levels and in the place we had move to many miles away we had no close friends or family. I tried to make light of it because I knew before we did not have good relations with our relatives. Still, I felt a lack and I felt like life was tough and I had trouble making friends but kept studying and starting college despite depression and anxiety. My dad would say, Keep your eyes on the ball. I did and tried...but things got worse and worse and I lost motivation to study and shortly after my sibling's illness started developing. College is a stressful time for most people but adding family stuff and unstable mentality, it precipitated the psychotic illness.

But life after PTSD is not the same. I don't even try to move forward. I've seen the tightrope we were walking on and now I've retreated back to safety and hugging my knees, looking for signs of doom in my sibling's rash covered swollen face (because of all the meds), in my dad's words when any kind of tension is in the air (is he gonna try to fly away again?), in mom's whole body (is she going to fly off handle? Is she being passive aggressive with my sibling and is that gonna push my sibling over the edge?). Every time I look and look and when I see a couple of signs or possibilities, I retreat like a turtle. I no longer even go to the library (my only excursion out of my one-bedroom apartment rented with the financial help of social services people, aside from shopping once a week or so and drop by my parents once every ten days). I eat can foods and spend hours online mindlessly not noticing the passage of times. I keep remembering my therapist's words: be mindful. I don't want to. There is no solution. Now I understand why people do drugs. You wouldn't ask someone to be mindful in the war zone. You tell them to look away. Till sweet death comes and takes you away.

Hi Partless, welcome to PC and the PTSD forum. I am sorry you have been struggling so much and feeling alone with it too.

When we are growing up we trust our parents to know how to "fix" things. After all they are grownups, don't grownups just know? Well, many people spend a good portion of their adulthood getting over what their parents didn't know how to fix or what to do to make things "safe". The truth is, not all parents are really "grown up" and prepared to make sure everything is right, fixed, understood, explained, and safe.

Yes, sometimes a sibling can have challenges, challenges that can even be scary and confusing, challenges that even our grown up parents don't know how to deal with, even try to disassociate from if they can. It sounds like no one was there to explain it to you and comfort you when you were frightened by it either.

I am sorry you developed PTSD from that too, but, you can heal believe it or not, it's just going to take time. I know, PTSD can be very lonely sometimes, especially when family members are not really "there" in a supportive way.

You know what I get? I get the response of "I don't want to go there, I don't want to talk about it, I am busy and I gotta go now", even been told that I better snap out of it or I will lose everything when I was in a psych ward in bad shape and in shock. Funny how one can have family around yet be incredibly lonely at the same time.

Well, you can give in, or, you can embrace it and understand it better and work at it and even decide to help others like yourself too. You are not alone with being alone with it and even having family members who don't really want to know or listen too. So, be a weed that grabs on and grows anyway, even though you have been named a weed.

(((Caring Hugs)))
OE

I am "moderatored" so what that means is I have to stop interacting as soon I begin to feel or have a "need" of my own. If I am asked "how are you", never answer with anything other than fine and respond with "how are you and the other person will talk and talk and talk all about their needs, feelings, challenges and if I want the conversation to end, talk about "my" needs or challenges or feelings.

The one place that I "can" talk and feel is with my T.

You are not alone with feeling alone.