Murdering the mind

February 13, 2016

It hit me hard this morning when I arrived at the VFW to attend our weekly Young Marines meeting with my son, a PFC Young Marine in our local unit. I have devoted each and every Saturday to spending my days volunteering for our unit and being the Paymaster which is truly an honor. It has allowed me to spend the day being with my son, has given me opportunities to meet the people of our community and I have formed lasting friendships with not only the Staff and Commander but have found a deep love and appreciation for our Veterans for what they have given for our country. I have thought about what those Veterans must have gone through just so we can have our luxuries but I failed to realize the true struggles and demons they must be facing now after they come home. It seems that on some level they struggle just the way I do even though I have never served in the Military or seen the war and tragedies they have seen, but I have been through my own war and had my own tragedies. 

What is the most difficult thing to understand, is how do you tell the world that you have an illness that nobody can see? If it weren't for Neurofeedback and Jack Stell, I would never have known that you can in fact, see that PTSD and TBI do exist in the brain and are very real despite what people may think. They both affect different parts of your brain and although they can have overlapping symptoms, each disorder has it's own set of issues and rules to they way they allow you to function in your daily life.  

This article helps to explain the differences between the two: http://www.healthline.com/health-news/brain-scan-can-tell-ptsd-apart-from-traumatic-brain-injury-071115#3

Patients with TBI showed decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, temporal lobes, and cerebellum. These brain regions govern self-control of mood and behavior, memory formation, and coordinated movement.

 Meanwhile, patients with PTSD showed increased activity in the limbic system, basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, and temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes. Brain regions that are involved in fear processing and emotional regulation, sensory processing, and integration of information are also affected.

So many parts of the brain are affected and the plethora of symptoms you might see in someone with TBI and PTSD are not the same for everyone who suffers from them . After noticing symptoms in myself for almost 4 years now, it is compelling evidence after the fact that I am in fact NOT crazy or losing my mind, I am simply affected by the two disorders and have been for some time. Now, it is time to figure out how to manage my symptoms and find a way to cope with the fact that nobody can physically see what has been destroying me. I often tell Jim, my sweetheart, that the only way i know how to describe what is going on for me is that it feels like my mind has been murdered. It has been punctured and slaughtered, left in a disarray of mutilation and death. Navigating this crime scene is overwhelming and painful almost every day. The imprints of the damage inflicted upon my brain are easily identified by the changes in my personality, my behaviors and my inability to function on a "normal" level anymore. I feel myself struggling to hang on even when I want to let go and often find myself feeling like the elephant in the room because I am standing in the middle of the room screaming and yelling for someone to help me, to make the insanity inside my head stop, waving my arms wildly tears streaming down my face, begging for anyone to see me and see my pain.....but they don't and they can't. So they just stare or look through me like I do not exist because somehow that is easier to do than to be a human being. 

I need validation that I matter and that I am still here, that I am real because I don't feel that I am anymore. My body is numb but my mind is on fire every minute of the day freaking itself out trying to make familiar connections to things that no longer exist in me. This brings me to something Jack asked me to write about and explain to him; what is real? Is Jim real to me and if he is, how do i know? I can honestly say that I do not know what "normal" is anymore. My normal and your normal are two very different things and I now realize that nobody knows what anyones definition of normal truly is because there is no standard level of normal that applies to each and every person. In my world, normal used to be the life and person I was and loved. My career was my existence and was everything about what made me who I was. I devoted 16 years to a profession that challenged me everyday and that satisfied all of the things I thought it took to be a functioning, happy person in society and in my community. It wasn't a love for Insurance that had a hold on me for so long, it was a love for my ability to change people's lives for the better by educating them on Insurance and showing them how to protect what they valued the most in their lives.  

I spent 12-16 hours a day working and loved every hour of it and when I met Jim he understood and respected that I was devoted to my work and encouraged me to continue doing what I loved, even though it meant less time with me. He was happy if I was happy, he supported my decision to change Agencies early in our relationship even though it meant that my commute to work went from 5 minutes to an hour and a half each way making my day 3 hours longer than before. Since I met Jim, I have questioned if my life with him is real, I still do everyday because it seems too good to be true. I feel as if I don't deserve what he gives me, and cannot figure out how he can be content with who I am and what I bring to our relationship. I feel inadequate and not good enough for him, and often feel unworthy of his time, his friendship and his love. But then there is that small voice in me that says I do deserve all that I have with him because I am good enough and because he is the sunshine in my dark world, balancing out all of the evil with his goodness. 

How do I know that Jim is real and that he truly exists in my world?  After exhausting every answer that makes any sense I have come to the conclusion that I don't know that he is real or that he truly exists but he is real to me.  Not the answer I had hoped to come up with but it is the only one that makes sense to my fragile and shattered mind. The only one that satisfies the feeling in my gut so it must be the right answer for me. I cannot say that he physically exists at all, that any part of my life does for that matter. I only know that he exists because I imagine that he does, I have no way to validate what I feel or think but he is with me every day and for me, that makes him real enough. This is a far harder question to answer than you realize because how do you prove something in your mind to be tangible enough for others to see too? Sure, Jim is real because people have met him in person or spoken to him on the phone but what does that prove really? Jim is real to me because I feel his love and support, I feel his arms when they hold me and hear his words when he comforts me and tells me he loves me. I feel the only safe thing that I know with him and his ability to take away the cruel world when it is coming down on me makes him real. It is him who shields me from what I am afraid of and it is he who reminds me that I am worth everything to him and deserve all that he gives me and more. He is real because he tells me that he is, that he is not my imagination or someone in my dreams but that he is right here in front of me, holding my hand and guiding me when my path is too dark to navigate on my own. 

These are the reasons that he is real to me and nothing exists that allows me to prove to you in a way that you will feel the same. I cannot make Jim be real for you, i can only do that for myself and perhaps he only exists in my mind so that I can survive what is destroying me, but wouldn't that be enough if it stopped me from completely perishing as a person? Why does he have to be real to anyone else if he is real for me? Nothing is real anyways, not in a way that makes sense, everything around us, our realities, our truths the physical things we have they only exist in our minds and nowhere else. We create our surroundings with our thoughts, we don't really know what is real at all then do we? Myself, you, Jim we are as real as we believe and so are the struggles and trauma that got us to this place.  I wish it were as easy to wish them away and stop the aftermath of having your mind murdered don't you?