Saturday morning trigger

Even though it is many years since I nearly died in a massive motor vehicle trauma/smash up at around 8.40 am on a Saturday morning in summer I still find I struggle a lot with PTS symptoms on this day.    I actually had another accident in 2005 when I was doing a cranio sacral session to deal with the consequences of that earlier trauma.  My marriage had broken down a year before and the second accident which involved me going head first over the handlebars of a push bike in the busy Mill Road in Cambridge around 4.45 pm was a retraumatisation, and I broke my head open at that time, being all alone in a country far from home, on the run from an emotionally distant family.

Every day around 4.30 to 6.30 I have major retrigger panic episodes.  At times I feel I am drowning in my own phlegm and I did have a punctured lung in the first accident, fluid filled my chest cavity from a broken rib that pierced it and then they had to put me in ICU and could not operate to stitch up the sever lacerations to my legs, knee, and arm.  Just newly out of braces I lost one and a half front teeth and cut my toungue nearly in half.  I was not allowed to see myself for a few weeks and I was attached to a bed in skeletal traction (with a pin going through the top of my lower leg bones) for over 101 days.

Today when I woke I was again checking my orientation, struggling to stand and not feel like I would go unconscious our drown.  It seems very real to me and some days I can get the focus off the symptoms which then ark up when I eat or attempt to go for a walk.  Its a tug of war between expansion and contraction to in my gut and muscles which is part of my muscles tensing due to the impacts and my attempt to run or get away from emotional invalidation, overwhelm of boundaries, subtle abuse that I was unable to recognise as such until recently.

I just read a post on someone who is trying to face his own traumas in therapy.  He is at the point of not wanting to accept and of struggling.  This is only natural and all part of the process and such things need to be approached in small doses according to trauma specialist Peter Levine.  We also need a balance between facing the horror/terror of painful feelings/reactions and staying grounded in present time where we look for pleasant things outside of the experience that can anchor us to the here and now.  I am now just over 12 years out of the later trauma but I have only been in safe, contained, protected space of about 7 now and not in terms of being boundary savvy either, as due to not feeling good enough I struggle all the time with my boundaries and with a healthy self concept.  I can be full of loathing at times if I buy into my inner critic, something I am learning to do less and recognise more.

I just wanted to post this before lunch to say to followers you should not feel shame for struggling even years out of past traumas.   Trauma can and does live inside and we can at times choose where to put the focus, but we will never be people who never knew or experienced this pain and we need to accept that, but we can also make progress towards a better life.