Against PTSD

There is no post- to the trauma we experience.

I was in therapy for six years, essentially for PTSD. Yes there was the other stuff—the childhood stuff and the family stuff and the identity stuff. But the thing I was trying to rid myself of, the thing I hoped the doctor could fix in the same way a medical doctor can fix a broken bone, was my body and mind’s reaction to two events that nearly killed me. 

My nervous system was shot. I’d have flashbacks in which I was convinced I was going back to day one, that I’d have to start my healing all over again. I’d melt into a puddle of panic. A car backfiring could send me into a spiral. A stressful day could feel like the end of the world. This did not feel like a sustainable way to live, and so I wanted to cure it. 

Unfortunately, it turns out, it doesn't really work that way. Which is not to say I did not get better—the healing power of therapy and time and reflection and body work and all the rest returned me to a state of functionality. The tools all enabled me to, eventually, get through most days without dissociating or panicking or becoming paralyzed with dread.

And yet I still do not feel healed. And increasingly I am sure that I never will. Because there is nothing really to heal from. Or rather the thing I am trying to heal from is not a discrete thing, but part of something much larger and inextricable from my being. There is no post- to my traumatic stress, because the trauma and the stress are not individual events or entities that can be relegated to the past; they are instead one seemingly eternal and all-encompassing thing that is there always, for worse and for better.