Understanding Recovery From Sexual Abuse (Part 4)

Jan Broberg:
So we have been talking about PTSD, CPTSD, and what the symptoms of PTSD are, what sorts of events and traumatic events that we experience in life can bring on PTSD, and of course for me what I have found especially interesting about PTSD and CPTSD is that it is often very hard to get diagnosed for. when you are a sexual assault survivor. And not all people who have experienced sexual assault necessarily have PTSD. But if you have long-term effects, or if life seems to have gone on after your traumatic event, and then all of a sudden there are the symptoms of PTSD, which I want to just briefly mention again so that we are all on the same page as we move forward in this conversation about. PTSD and is there hope for healing from it? How do you do that? How do you figure it out? So the four symptoms, the four main symptoms of PTSD are when you are reliving the event over and over again because you are having nightmares, flashbacks or triggers. And so you're thinking about it and reliving the event. That's one of the symptoms, main symptoms. The second one is if you are avoiding situations that remind you of the event. So you had something that happened, a car accident, and now you will no longer get in a car, you will do anything but get in a car. Like that's just a simplified version of that reliving. Maybe it's a relationship that was very traumatic, very abusive, and now you won't go into any kind of a relationship. So if you're avoiding situations that remind you of that event, then that also is a PTSD signal. that you might have PTSD. And then the third one is that if there are these huge negative changes in your belief system, in your feelings, like all of a sudden the world went from being full of possibilities and that, you know, we can, you know, work through things and we can get better. And of course, we're going to have ups and downs and, you know, life is a roller coaster, enjoy the ride. And now Your belief is there is no hope for humanity. There is no hope for me. I will always have these feelings of doubt, of self-hatred, of shame, of guilt, of anger, whatever rage. It will never change and I will always have this or I will always feel this way or I will never feel this way. That is also one of the main symptoms of PTSD. And then the fourth and final one. is that if you are feeling like you are always keyed up, like the feelings of, they call it hyper, hyper arousal, where you're always like on edge, you're always at the brink of, of yelling or, you know, screaming and or crying or anything where you feel like you are constantly on an edge of like, if I were on a bridge, I, that with my emotions, the way I feel. that the that hyper aroused state of mind and emotional like you're just so easily triggered all the time into this emotional like battlefield that is also if any of those things last for more than four weeks then I say I would if it's you or somebody that you love I would encourage yourself or someone else to go and try and get a diagnosis. And it may not be PTSD, it might be something else. It could be a lot of things as I'm learning more and more about borderline personality disorder, about bipolar disorder, about so many things that people struggle with or just manic depression. It can be so many things. But when you take care. of yourself and your mental health, which is every bit as important as your physical health. And the best comparison I have is like, would you go without brushing your teeth for weeks and weeks and months and months and not expect that you might have a cavity or some tooth pain? Yeah, you will. Because if you don't brush your teeth, you will eventually, you know, have some real problems in your in your mouth and in pain and it can even cause death. Did you know that? Because your teeth are so close to your brain. Anyway, but who doesn't think it's important to brush their teeth? Well, I think mental health is exactly in the same category as brushing your teeth. So we're gonna talk a little bit about is there hope? If you are diagnosed with PTSD, can people heal from this? mental state or disorder. So if you think that you might have PTSD, the only way to know for sure is you have to talk to a mental health care provider. I only have a limited knowledge about what I've experienced. This is all based on my own experiences and the experiences of others who I am close to and what they've experienced through their own sexual assault stories. physical health and traumatic event stories that I can speak at all to this subject. But I can tell you that if you go to the right mental health professional and you take, you know, the time and the self-care to actually find out that you're worth it. That's what I can tell you. You are worth it. Your quality of life is worth it. And that there are things that can be done. to help you. treat what has happened where the lights have been left on in your brain because your brain is just trying to help you survive, but those lights being left on for an extended period of time and years will cause distress. I find it very fascinating that one of the things that they used as torture and that they studied, and this is a terrible thing that happened to people, was to deprive people of sleep. One of the most important needs of your physical, emotional, and mental health is sleep. And when they deprived people of sleep, and this has been done in various torture situations around, you know, the world and during war times and, you know, Nazi... you know, torture, there's just been a lot of that done, that when it comes right down to it, people would rather have sleep, that is more of a need than food, than sex, and then, and water is right up there with sleep. But sleep, so something that we take for granted, that a lot of people have problems with, can be a trigger for something very traumatic in your... mental health, sleep, which is a physical thing. We think of it as physical. So I just want people to know that when we talk about things that seem to be mental health, they also affect our physical health. And I know everybody knows that on some level, but sometimes we don't make that connection. And so we don't spend the time or the money to actually do what needs to be done for the mental part of our being. So What can you do if you think you have PTSD? First of all, you find a mental health care provider. There is a self-screening test. If you just put it in your computer, Google Drive or whatever, however you look up things, probably ChatGPT has an answer for this. But I don't trust that totally, not yet. I mean, I think it's incredible. But at the same time, there are some tests that you can take that will just pop up online. So. for PTSD or PC PTSD for CPTSD you can put those things in your search bar and they'll come up. So you can learn if you have the symptoms that suggest that you should go talk to a provider. All right so let's talk about will you get better if you are diagnosed with PTSD. Can you get better? Well first of all we have to remember that getting better is up for, I guess it's up for debate. What it means to one person might be different than another person. So I think you have to determine that if the relief of one or two of the symptoms would change your quality of life, then would it be worth it? Of course. What if it could completely eliminate all of those symptoms that I talked about and other things that maybe aren't on that very short list? So. I think the treatment options are, you know, there's a variety of treatment options, but for you to decide that you're worth it is the first step. And then to call a mental health care provider to know if maybe they specialize in this kind of a therapy, because that's the first thing. The first and foremost thing that you can do so that these symptoms don't interfere with your everyday life, with your... know, your relationships and your work, you know, if you can't enjoy your everyday life, it's up and down. It has, you know, there are parts of everybody's work that are a drag, you know, there are parts of every relationship that are very, you know, done by rote. Okay, we always do this same thing every day. It's not that exciting like it was in the beginning. There are things like that everybody has in their life. And yet, if you can't enjoy some of the mundane everyday activities of your life and then go, oh, and guess what? I'm off at six. We're going to go out to dinner and celebrate my birthday today. Like, I just had a birthday and I, you know, I had a few of those up and down feelings. Like, do I even want to celebrate birthdays anymore? You know, it's interesting to get older and to still feel like I'm, you know, I'm this young person trapped in this old, old body. No, I'm not that old, but I feel that way sometimes. And yet, even with a few emotional roller coasters about, you know, aging and just, you know, trying to get through some work things that I had to do on my birthday, you know, had some strategic planning things we were doing and, you know, just life and the things that you're doing, I still had something to look forward to and I still was excited that it was my birthday. And if you can't do that, if you don't have that kind of quality of life. I want you to have that. And so I want you to get to the mental health provider that is going to help you through, you know, PTSD. My dog is now chiming in. He might have PTSD. I took him to the vet today and he got blood work done and toenails and he has this little nerve damage or something that's making his right paw in the front hurt and he lifts it up and apparently that they think we might need to get the doggy chiropractor. So, you know, I'm willing to spend $400 on my dog today because I don't want him to be in pain. And it might be that it's a chiropractic nerve thing that can be treated because his blood work looked great. He's all healthy, he doesn't have diabetes. All these things that I was worrying about are not the problem. So we'll keep looking until he gets some relief, but you know, he got. you know, some fur balls dug out of his paw and some matting and got his toenails clipped up. And so we'll see how he's doing. My point is that you should be able to enjoy to some degree your life. Everyday activities, everyday work activities, everyday relationship activities. There should be some level of. hope and happiness and just enjoyment of just the every day. And if you don't experience that, then there's something up and really you're worth it. Okay. So really the two main treatments for PTSD are basically psychotherapy, you know, talk therapy, basically is what that is, where you find a good therapist and, and really the The other thing is medication. And I don't know much about medication. I've only been on one SSRI in my life for a short period of time, just that elevated my serotonin levels. Because basically the therapist that I was working with said, you know what, as I listen to you and what you've been through in your life, and the fact of the matter is your serotonin levels might just be super low because they've been depleted. So why don't we just... try this to see if that helps that depression that you're having because I didn't know what it was. I went to a therapist I'm like what is this black cloud following me around? It feels like somebody's put a concrete block around my head and set it on my head and shoulders and my face is peeking through it but it feels like I can't get any light above my eyes like somebody's you know holding up their hand to their eyes and but yet it's this heavy, heavy weight. So it had a physical manifestation for me when I was experiencing depression. And within a few months, you know, I started to feel like myself again, and I felt very good and normal. And I know some people need to take, you know, medications their whole life. And again, there's nothing wrong with any of that. It's just what it is. You got to I can't really speak too much about SSRIs from a personal experience point of view, but there are medications that can help. So what I'd like to concentrate on, since I don't know a ton about the medications, although a lot of times psychotherapy and medication is used together, as in my case for that depression, that I was like, why am I having this? I've never experienced this before. And then as the therapist got into my story, he's like, well, I could have a few thoughts about why you might be experiencing some depression. And that's what he thought it was. And I agreed, as he described, you know, various things, you know, and I was young, I was I think Austin might have been about, I don't know, maybe three, two, three, four years old at that time. So I'm talking 30 years ago. So I was probably late 20s, early 30s when this happened. And I, and so he did, he used talk therapy and psychotherapy as I continued to go and meet with him weekly and in conjunction with, I think it was just Prozac. I think it was the granddaddy of them all. Anyway, Orwell Buterin, one of those two. that's, you know, using those two things together. But I want to just talk about psychotherapy for a minute. There are several treatments and many others that I'm not going to touch on, but I want to touch on the three main ones that I'm familiar with that have been, you know, very helpful for me or others that I know who have been through sexual assault and trauma. At least these have worked miracles in people's lives. So trauma focused therapy, which focuses on memory of the traumatic event or its meaning, is what this, you know, several articles and this one that I have been studying and going to other, you know, places to look up like, okay, is that really true? So this one that I had written down on my notes for myself, they say trauma focused psychotherapy, which focuses on the memory of the traumatic event or its meaning. Now there's two separate things there. The traumatic event is like what happened. It's like the facts. Or its meaning is what your mind decided that traumatic experience meant. So we're talking something like a traumatic brain injury affects the brain in certain ways, depending on. the injury happened and all of that, right? We know that there are different parts of the brain that will be affected. So the manifestation of that injury are different in different traumatic brain injury people that have experienced that. But same is true for your traumatic event. There are facts surrounding it and then there is the meaning that the mind has created. So one of those examples would be, you know, here's the facts, you know, this 40 year old man put, you know, his body parts, you know, into my body parts. It was painful. That was a physical response. It was confusing. That was an emotional response. It was not anything that I knew what to do. All of that. Those are kind of facts at the time. So you can you can break things down to this. very factual diagnosis. And then what you have to factor in is what did my mind make it mean? What did it mean so that I could survive it? That's the brain surviving what it did. But what did I do emotionally, mentally, in my mind to survive? And for me, I can go into that story, and I have many times. it was to be able to make meaning that I was important, that I was special, that I was supposed to save a dying planet, that no matter what it all costs, that this was how he got me, as he brainwashed me. But the outcome of that is that little mind will mean, the meaning could be, okay, I'm special. The meaning could be he's special and important too. The meaning could also be something like, when I knew the truth of it all, I could make it mean that, you know, that he was, that this is how my life was going to be with every man that I ever met for the rest of my life. That could have been a meaning that I put on it, right? That I had to overcome or get rid of. So anyway, these are the kinds of things that, you know, you need to realize that this. that this trauma focused psychotherapy which focuses on the memory of the traumatic event or its meaning is the most effective treatment for PTSD. There are different types of trauma focused psychotherapy and these are the three types that have all actually been really effective for myself in my own healing. So there's the cognitive processing therapy which is CPT and in cognitive processing therapy I'm just going to read it to you is where you learn skills to understand how trauma changed your thoughts and feelings. That's what I was describing a minute ago, the mind and the emotions, how those, that trauma changed my mind, my thoughts, my feelings, and it changes how you think about the trauma so that you can change how you feel. So that's called cognitive processing therapy or CPT. That's been very effective for me. Then the second one prolonged exposure, which is PE, like go to your PE class and you know, run laps and lift weights. But this is a different PE. This is called prolonged exposure, where you talk about your trauma repeatedly until memories are no longer upsetting. This will help you get more control over your thoughts and feelings about the trauma. And you also go to places or do things that are safe. but that you have been staying away from because they remind you of the trauma. So you go to places, you do things that are actually safe that you were avoiding and staying away from because they reminded you of the trauma and you go there anyway and you have a different experience. So this has been highly effective. This has been probably the thing that I have done the most and I have done it. not only with therapists but I have done it just in my life's mission. My PE is talking about my trauma. I have talked about it so many times. I have told my story so many times that the memories of it are no longer upsetting. That is absolutely true. They really are not. People ask me often like, isn't it hard for you to relive your trauma and tell your story over and over again? And all I can say to them is, well, I'm not reliving my trauma over and over again. I'm not telling my story because I'm needing to relive it over and over again. I have now made a conscious choice that I will tell my story because it is how I can talk to others about how important it is to share their own stories, to find their voice, that they are worthy of healing and how they can heal. All of the things that I'm about, you know, are based on my access to my story. So the access that I have to my story, no longer do I have nightmares, nothing triggers me, I don't look under my car, in my back seat like I used to for years, long into my 20s. I don't, you know, I don't hyperventilate when my son leaves the house or, you know, when he was little, I could, I, little by little play dates were good, play dates were fine. Having people around was good. I had relationships again. You know, I learned and processed things through every relationship that I had, every marriage, every divorce. I processed more of my experience of trauma and I have just gotten better and better and better and more well and more happy and hopeful. And so I look back through that. telling of my story over and over again as a way that it not only helped me, but now I can use that to help others in their processing of their story, of finding their voice, because I know how important it is because I feel so differently now than I did when I was going through those negative memories and those nightmares and those... you know, scary things of, you know, having sex and getting married and trying to have a relationship and not knowing what was wrong with me. And I mean, I had a lot of guilt and shame. I had tons of issues and problems around confidence and self-confidence. And now I don't. Now I am a very happy, healthy, hopeful, confident human being. And I want others to have what I have. And that's why I do what I do. So for me, P.E. was very, very important. And going to places and facing things and trying things again, you know, that might have reminded me of the situation, but they were not that situation. They were different. It was a different person. It was a different time. I had a different level of understanding and knowledge. I studied brainwashing and, you know, terms and all of those things. as I talked about my story and learned more about brainwashing and grooming and all of the things that I that I know a lot about and I'm able to share with other people have all helped me in my own healing. So the third one that I want to mention is EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. So the This involves where you focus on sounds or hand movements while you talk about the trauma. So you're focusing your eyes on certain things or your ears and what it's doing it helps your brain work through the traumatic memories. So as you are talking about your trauma but your eyes are moving from side to side or there are certain sounds there's different There are, there's even something that I hear is emerging that's even, at least people are saying, it's even more effective than EMDR. But for me, this was also very effective. So that processing where you get desensitized about the trauma, because it's repatterning things in your brain. Your brain is literally making a new pathway. The neurons and the neural pathways are reprogramming. your actual brain that has been on high alert, has had the light switch on for 30 years, and all of a sudden you do this EMDR therapy and you're like, oh, it's like the lights could be turned off or there was a dimmer on the lights. I'm not in this hyper edgy, crazy place. It was very interesting. The things that I've, anyway, those things that I've been able to experience myself have been highly effective. And then of course there's the medications. So those are the three I wanted to mention today and talk a little bit about my own experiences. But I really think it's very important that I read you this disclaimer because it talks about different SSRIs and SNRIs which are those serotonin, oh norepinephrine uptake, reuptake inhibitors. Those I can't think of all the words right but. They are the ones that are used for depression primarily, and they also work for PTSD. So there's a bunch of different ones, and because I can't remember how to pronounce all those names, I won't even try. But I do want to read this important disclaimer. It says benzodiazepines and atypical antipsychotics should generally be avoided for PTSD treatment because they do not treat the core PTSD symptoms and can be addictive. So just in case you're considering some other things, you might want to just look at your personality, your family history. Are you easily addicted? Do you have an addictive, what we used to call personality? I don't even think they call it that anymore, but I can't think of a better name. So I'll just end with that. Just know that there are people to contact, therapists and mental health care professionals. And I really know. that things can be better. They may not be completely freed up, although sometimes they really are. That really does happen. And so I want there to be hope in your heart and in your in your mind that there can be, you know, that your stress, your depression, your anger, your rage, your sadness can be alleviated, at least to some degree, and you can have a better quality of life. Anyway, thanks so much for being here and listening. know pass this on if you think it might help somebody and in the meantime I will see you on the other side of trauma.