PTSD under a directed microscope

I haven't written here for a long time because life has been overwhelming, so much so that the thought of trying to write about everything--or anything!--is too much and I can't sit down and choose one thing and just type. But I am going to try, now, because I think I have learned something.

A little over a month ago, I finally left Hanover. Hanover...Dartmouth...I still do not know what my final thoughts on it are, what is left when I subtract my pain from my joys. I made friends, but I lost friends. I learned to be social, then had my trust in people painfully punished. I do not know if I can trust anyone from that era of my life. But that was not the subject of this post.

What I wanted to talk about was the biggest change I am experiencing now. As part of a study, I am undergoing a couples-based cognitive behavioral therapy program designed for PTSD. I am not sure how much I can go into the details of it, since it is still a study, so instead of the mechanics, I will talk about what I have learned. Namely, I have learned that PTSD is not just a collection of symptoms like nightmares, flashbacks, emotional numbness, and hyperarousal. It is a damaging way of thought and of living life that results from trauma. I have been told, and am still trying to accept, that PTSD is not me. I am not my pain, and my pain is not me. My therapist likes to call PTSD a gremlin that invaded my life, something that can be eradicated that isn't part of myself. That is a stuck point for many people with PTSD, she says-- thinking that your suffering is part of you and so it becomes much more difficult and terrifying to fight it.

Fear. Fear is what PTSD thrives on. I have learned that my particular PTSD gremlin delights in constantly making me worry about the worst thing that could happen at any moment. I am filled with the dread and conviction that I am always in danger, or at the brink of losing what is dearest to me because bad things can and do happen at a moment's notice. Every time D* leaves, I am scared sick that I will never see him again. I live in a state of hyperarousal, jumping at the slightest noise, terrified that my door rattling means someone is going to break in, always watching, always looking.

Fear wants control. I have to be in control of what happens both around me and in me so I can be prepared for when something bad inevitably happens. The way I subconsciously try to control my emotions and prepare myself for the worst that can happen is what was destroying my ability to lead a happy and healthy life. For example, because of the lack of validation that I received from others each time after I was raped, I rely on my pain as evidence that something terrible did in fact happen. I control my displays of distress until I know they are happening for a reason (such as after a stimulus that I consciously recognize as a trigger-- e.g. a mention of rape, seeing someone who looks like him, realizing it's Friday night or the 25th/26th of each month), and then I allow myself to feel distressed and show visible pain. That is the only way I found to believe that what happened to me was legitimately bad. This is another stuck point for PTSD: believing that you have to keep your pain around as proof that something bad really happened.

Lack of control is severely distressing and leads to a spiral of negative thoughts. For example, after one evaluative session, I was feeling tense and a little numb but otherwise okay. I met up with D* and, after a little while, ventured up the courage to ask for a hug. As I was trying to relax, I very suddenly started sobbing. I had no idea that I was about to cry, and the feeling of being startled and totally helpless was terrifying. I could not stop sobbing no matter how hard I tried. Don't get me wrong-- I cry all the time. It wasn't the fact that I was crying that terrified me. It was the fact that I was crying and didn't know why and hadn't found a trigger or reason to allow myself to.

Control becomes an issue in other ways too. Remember what I mentioned earlier about fear? When you put together fear and control, you get fear that you won't be in control of a situation, fear that something bad will happen and you won't be prepared. What that leads to for me is extreme black and white thinking and thinking the worst. This is where my therapist's bumper sticker comes in.

After our first session, I was having trouble calming down and I couldn't stop crying, so D* and I went back to her office (interrupting her lunch :( ) and she spent another hour kindly and patiently explaining the pitfalls of my own mind. Then she gave me a bumper stick that said:

Don't believe everything you think.

It didn't make sense to me at the time, but I am starting to see its significance now. We have just started the stage of bubble sheets in therapy. What I'm supposed to do is notice a PTSD-fueled thought, write it down, brainstorm alternative thoughts, and evaluate which is the more balanced thought. In short, it is an exercise to literally replace my harmful PTSD thoughts with more balanced, less black-and-white thoughts. As you might be able to imagine, my mind is barely submitting to this, kicking and screaming all the way.

The first time we tried it, the thought we challenged was "If D* leaves, I will be all alone." (This was made all the more poignant by the fact that D* actually had to leave immediately after our therapy session to go to his first day at a new job, and I was crying the whole way through the session because I was thinking about being left all alone right afterwards.) While we were working on this in the session together, I just couldn't come up with any alternatives. My mind simply did not understand that there was any alternative to that thought; it could not conceive of the possibility that there was a more balanced way to think about him leaving. D* and my therapist made a great list of alternatives; for example, "Even though I want to be with D* the most, I am not totally alone when he leaves"; "When D* leaves, I can still reach him by phone"; and "Even if D* leaves, he still cares about me." All my mind could think of was these alternatives are all lies and I don't believe them because I really do think I will be all alone and I will be terrified and despondent and I may never see him again and I just can't do this. To make the rest of the long story short, that day I almost ended up hospitalized. My mind really was not liking this exercise at all.

I tried doing some more bubble sheets with D* again this afternoon. I ended up sobbing hysterically again, but I realized something important: the reason they affect me so is that I am terrified that I could delude myself into thinking that things are better than they are and so I would be caught defenseless and unprepared when it is all revealed that it was a lie. I feel safest believing the worst because that way, I will at least not be caught unprepared (whether The Bad Thing will happen or not is not even up for consideration). The way my therapist puts it, PTSD has given me fear-colored goggles that only see danger everywhere I look. This translates into a desperate need for control and a crippling lack of trust in everyone, even D*. Even though part of me knows he cares about me, I still can't bring myself to fully believe that he does. I don't fully trust that his affections won't stray, or trust that he means what he says. It's an awful barrier between us that he has done nothing to bring on. He is the sweetest, most wonderful boyfriend that I can imagine, who has done everything he can to help me through my PTSD spells and who is sacrificing so much to come with me to therapy even though it means he has to drive down to Boston at least once a week. I am trying to plant in my mind the conviction and determination to go through with this therapy program to beat the PTSD gremlin that is building all kinds of barriers between us.

We're almost halfway through the treatment program. The trauma focus is about to begin, where I will have to challenge my beliefs about blame, trust, and control regarding the rape and the aftermath. I will try to be less intimidated about writing about it and blog more regularly.

Book: The Name of the Wind

The Name of the Wind is a fantastic fantasy (hur hur, pun intended) novel by Patrick Rothfuss. It is the first of a trilogy, and I am *so* excited for the second book, whenever it manages to make its way out. Rothfuss has such a way with words, and manages to evoke the most powerful, wonderful descriptions of everything from music to PTSD.

I just wanted to type up a section that I found particularly profound:

Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying "time heals all wounds" is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.

In the interest of not spoiling this book for anyone who is interested in reading it in its fabulous entirety (you should!), I'm going to quote more of the book, but heavily ellipsed.

[After a trauma occured] I wandered deep into the forest and slept. My body demanded it, and my mind used the first door to dull the pain. The wound was covered until the proper time for healing could come. In self-defense, a good portion of my mind simply stopped working--went to sleep, if you will.

While my mind slept, many of the painful parts of the previous day were ushered through the second door. Not completely. I did not forget what had happened, but the memory was dulled, as if seen through thick gauze. If I wanted to, I could have brought to memory [details about the trauma]. But I did not want to remember. I pushed those thoughts away and let them gather dust in a seldom-used corner of my mind.

I dreamed, not of [bad things associated with the trauma], but of gentler things. And slowly the wound began to grow numb....

But enough of quotes-- I'm afraid of giving too much away of a story that should not be spoiled. But so much of this story spoke out to me, with the portrayal of numbness, the repulsion that happens when one tries--whether consciously or subconsciously--to remember things that are not ready to be thought about, triggers, and the general mental and physical changes that occur after one survives a trauma.

It's a beautiful book, and definitely worth reading. It's not entirely trauma-centric, but the portrayal of PTSD is one of the better ones I have encountered in fiction.

Site: David Baldwin's Trauma Information Pages

http://www.trauma-pages.com/

I just found this site today, so I am still in the process of reading through it, but it looks fantastic. It is a well-written, informative resource about PTSD that tends towards the academic side. I think the strength of this site is the multitude of links to journal articles and scientific resources. Goodness knows that a lot of my healing and coping has come through being able to distance myself from my own experience a little bit and focus on academic treatment of sexual assault and PTSD, so this site may be helpful for a survivor looking to find validation through research or a productive distraction from his/her own trauma. Definitely worth a look.

Strong emotions as a trigger for PTSD

I think I've discovered another trigger for myself. I've read about it in fact sheets and the like, but haven't actually had it affect me until this morning.

The trigger? Strong or extreme emotion. In this case, fury. Over breakfast, I had a suspicion confirmed and became overwhelmingly angry at someone for being a coward and a liar and taking my friendship and completely sh*tting on it. I was furious. Then I had to go to class, and found that I couldn't concentrate during lecture. No biggie, right? Sometimes I have days like that, when I just space out and can't focus. I was listening most of the time, but not 100% focusing. Then I got really cold suddenly, and had to put on a jacket. I felt kind of sick to my stomach, dizzy, disoriented. It wasn't until after I left class and was walking home that I realized that I was completely dissociated. I was looking at the world through the same eyes as I did a year and a half ago, where everything was there but somehow not real. I'm not sure how to explain it. It was warm and balmy outside, but I was huddled in two jackets and detached from everything. Everything around me seemed to have an extra echo or shadow to it, because it felt like I wasn't really there and observing it first-hand. Pretty classic detachment the way I used to experience it.

The funny thing is that my fury at this dipshit has absolutely nothing to do with my rape or any previous abuse. For all his cowardice and dishonesty, I do believe that he wasn't being an asshole just because I was raped. (He's just a jerk, plain and simple.) My overwhelming, seething rage has nothing to do with the cause of my PTSD, but somehow it still triggers me. Interesting.

I remember reading that extreme emotion, whether related to the trauma or not, can be a trigger for survivors. I'll have to try to find a reference for this. When I find it, I'll edit this post or make a new one.


On a more optimistic note, I've been better overall at controlling my responses to triggers. Lately there have been a lot because I've been around people who remind me of my rapist in little ways, but I've been able to take note of the resemblance, take a deep breath, and control any panic before it spirals out of control. I'm doing better with that.

PTSD and Sleep

(Lately here on my blog I've kind of veered off into personal musings about stuff, and I want to try to bring it back a little to posts about PTSD that might be helpful for other survivors (or people who want to try to understand what a survivor experiences). I remember being so relieved when I first read personal accounts of PTSD because it meant that I wasn't crazy or making things up and that what I was experiencing was legitimate. In this post I talk about the weird relationship I had with sleep (which was a part of my more complicated relationship with time, in general) during the aftermath of my trauma.)


Sleep is complicated. PTSD can affect sleep habits in several different ways; most often, survivors of a traumatic event have problems falling asleep. A fact sheet by the National Center for PTSD lists several reasons for this, including hyperalertness, physical medical problems (e.g. chronic pain, stomach problems), intrusive worries and thoughts, drug or alcohol abuse, and nightmares.

For the first few months after my trauma, I became nocturnal because I was unable or afraid to sleep. Then I had an abrupt reversal and started to seek sleep to comfort myself, pass the time, and hide from the rest of the world. It has taken me over a year to reach a happy medium without the use of sleep-inducing medication.

(That was the short version of this post. The elaborated version is below.)

I've had a love-hate relationship with sleep since middle school, when I first got internet access at my house. I slept six hours a night in high school and the first two years of college. Then I transferred to my current college, met more people, met more people who stayed up later, and began to stay up much later myself. I had terms where three to four hours a night was normal and five was excellent. Then I had a term with weekly all-nighters, which happened to be when I was first starting to un-repress memories of an abusive relationship, and everything started to spiral downhill. When the incident happened in March of 2009, that was it-- sleep and I were officially at odds with each other.

It happened in the wee hours of the morning, around 5 AM. I stayed up until 8 AM talking about it to a friend, and I was finally so exhausted and worn out that I changed clothes, crawled into bed, and fell asleep for a few hours. It wasn't until the next night that the shock and exhaustion began to wear off and the PTSD symptoms started to set in. I was jumping at the slightest sound, coming to full alertness bordering on wild panic at every little movement or noise. When I tried to sleep that night, the plant on my windowsill rustled and I froze; after that, I couldn't calm down, so I had to leave my room and go downstairs to be in the light with people I knew and felt safe with.

My relationship with sleep became erratic. In the months before the incident, when I was already wading through murky and sometimes severe depression, I had begun to use sleeping as a method of fighting off severe depressive episodes-- my rationale was that if I couldn't be happy, I might as well be comfortable. I would huddle in my bed with my stuffed dog and stare at the wall or cry until I fell asleep. Things were usually better when I woke up two hours later.

However, after I was raped, nighttime terrified me. As my friends began to drift off in search of their beds around midnight or so, I busied myself making sure I had plenty of diversions for the night-- usually novels and movies to pass the time and keep myself entertained or at the very least occupied. Around 1 AM, I would turn on all the lights in my room and settle in for the quiet hours, as I called them. If I was well-prepared for the night, I actually enjoyed it-- there was something about the peacefulness of the seemingly endless night that soothed me. I felt like I could somehow stay this way forever and ward off the coming of the next day. When the sun finally came up around 7 AM, the vague notion of sleep would make its first pass through my mind, and I would finally allow myself to drift off between 7-9 AM. I would then wake up around 4-5 PM and pass the time playing spider solitaire on my laptop until a friend of mine (who was absolutely instrumental in taking care of me and to whom I absolutely owe my sanity) left work and came to find me.

I think my problems with sleep were inextricably linked to my disorientation and lost sense of time. For about three months after my rape, it felt like time had stopped completely for me. I'm not sure how to explain it-- I felt frozen, stuck in the moment, unable to move on with my life. After the first week, it became clear to me that everyone else's lives were still moving forward, and it was extremely disorienting to watch that while I myself was incapable of basic things like eating and sleeping. I honestly don't remember most of those three months. I remember certain specific events, like going to the police station and the hospital and meeting with my dean, and I remember one night when I watched Sense and Sensibility and read Crown Duel/Court Duel by Sherwood Smith, and actually felt completely content. Otherwise, I have no idea how I spent those three months. This would have been my senior spring, my last term as an undergraduate, and I don't remember how I spent most of it. I don't know where those three months of my life went.

My sleep schedule started to fix itself when I became closer to the friend I mentioned previously. We began to sleep together (platonically, just sleep) in the TV room downstairs. Since he had a job with normal hours, he had some semblance of a sleep schedule, and I kind of went along with it. It became a ritual to watch Star Trek then fall asleep. I think not sleeping alone helped a lot, because I could be comforted when I had nightmares or woke up tensed in fear of some unknown thing.

In May we started officially dating. I got a small part-time job for the summer in the afternoons everyday. I would wake up around 9:30 when he left for work, then go back to sleep until 1 PM, wake up, eat lunch, go to work, then meet back up with him at 5 PM. Sleep became less frightening and anxiety-ridden, and I soon grew to see it as comforting.

After a few especially severe depressive/suicidal episodes at the beginning of the summer, my therapist recommended that I see a psychiatrist about medication. She put me on Zoloft, and I suddenly started wanting to sleep 12+ hours a day. I'd come home from work and want to fall asleep right after dinner. Sometimes I would go to sleep at 8 PM or 9PM -- absolutely unheard of since early elementary school. In the fall I got a part-time job with more hours. I became obsessed with sleep, anxious that I wouldn't get enough, afraid that I would be tired the next day. I was convinced that sleep was The Most Important Thing In The World, the be-all-end-all of, well, everything.

Suddenly I started having a hard time falling asleep. Panicked, I got a prescription for Ambien from my psychiatrist. I took one pill religiously every night, my anxiety abated, and I was finally able to sleep. On hindsight, I see now that my trouble falling asleep was probably because I was so anxious about not being able to fall asleep. (Productive cycle, no?) I've always been pretty good about drifting off within a few minutes of my head hitting the pillow, so it wasn't actual biological insomnia; it was the fear of being tired the next day that caused me so much anxiety that I was unable to fall asleep. And so I turned to the idea of the little pill-- importantly, not necessarily the pill itself, just the idea of it-- to soothe myself and allow myself to fall asleep. I couldn't-- or wouldn't?-- sleep without taking the pill.

I took Ambien every night for almost a year. I had some notably terrifying nightmares, but oddly enough, none of the actual rape itself. I had one horrifically violent dream that I could not get out of my head for days, another that played like a movie with an acquaintance-rape scenario starring yours truly, but most of my nightmares were about the aftermath and people's harsh, hurtful reactions. Those I woke up sobbing to, countless times over the course of the year.

Finally, the moment I'd been waiting for came-- I was going to return to classes to finish what was left of my degree. Oddly enough, it was my parents who convinced me to try sleeping without Ambien, and through the most unexpected way: my mom told me about her college years and convinced me that college was more flexible than work, so I could sleep when I needed to. She told me that if I couldn't fall asleep at night, I could wake up and read or play games or amuse myself somehow, and sleep later during the day when I was tired. She finally impressed upon me that sleep was not the be-all-end-all of college, and so one night I tried sleeping without taking Ambien. Lo and behold-- it was exactly the same as sleeping with it. I had absolutely no problem falling asleep once I convinced myself that it was okay if I couldn't.

Since then sleep and I have reached a truce of sorts. I now try to sleep nine hours a night if I can (I usually end up getting six to seven and napping once during the day). I have been off Ambien since the beginning of the summer. I'm actually working on lowering the dosage of my SSRI too, so eventually I will be able to stand on my own two feet again without medication. Despite the complicated relationship I've had with sleep (yes, reference to Facebook silliness fully intended), we seem to be doing okay now.

And we plan to live happily ever after. 


The End!

Dealing with PTSD while being a student

I'm having a rough time with anxiety this morning. Not sure why. Yesterday was an emotional roller-coaster for me, and this morning I am fidgeting with these intense feelings of unrest and anxiety and my stomach is nervous and my whole body is tensed and I don't know what to do. I can't calm down enough to do my homework, and that's probably making this worse. Which reminds me of a topic I've wanted to write about for a while-- PTSD, and specifically how it affects students.

A little overview of PTSD: 

After experiencing a traumatic event, most people will go through a variety of behaviors and responses. However, depending on the person--e.g. his/her past and personality--and the trauma itself, these physical and emotional responses may continue for months or even years. This is a normal response to an abnormal event.

Here are some common characteristics of PTSD:

• Flashbacks (reliving the traumatic event)
• Upsetting dreams about the traumatic event
• Attempts to avoid anything associated with the trauma
• Worrying or ruminating -- intrusive thoughts of the trauma
• Hyper-alertness/hyper-vigilance: being easily startled or frightened
• Memory problems
• Trouble concentrating, often caused by intrusive thoughts
  
• Irritability, restlessness, outbursts of anger or rage
• Feelings of helplessness, panic, feeling out of control
  
• Overwhelming guilt or shame
• Feeling emotionally numb
• Difficulty trusting and/or feelings of betrayal
• Feelings of detachment and disorientation
  
• Difficulty maintaining close relationships
  
• Tendency to isolate oneself 
• Concern over burdening others with problems
• Avoiding activities you once enjoyed
• Hopelessness about the future
• Self-destructive behavior
• Irregular sleeping patterns-- i.e. sleeping too much or too little

I have personally experienced most of those reactions. There are some I would like to expand on and discuss in more detail in future posts. However, for this particular entry, I want to talk about what it's like to be a student with these physical and emotional feelings.

My first experiences with coercion, pressure, and non-consensual sex occurred while in a relationship. I was stressed with schoolwork and extracurricular activities and lonely and isolated from my friends, so I repressed most of my feelings and continued on with trying to get through each day. It wasn't until a year or two later that I began to remember bits and pieces of what happened and started to talk about them. The final opening of the floodgates happened when I was raped by someone I considered a friend during the first weekend of my senior spring.

I tried desperately to continue my schoolwork. I loved both of my classes, and I really wanted everything to be okay. However, I could tell that something was really wrong starting the day after the event. I have always been easily startled, but suddenly every little noise and movement made me tense and anxious. I couldn't sleep at night, and so I became completely nocturnal, sleeping from about 8am - 5pm everyday. But most frightening to me was the fact that I couldn't read a textbook for more than two minutes at a time without intrusive thoughts about the rape and feelings of intense panic or depression, and the fact that my memory was gone.

I have always prided myself on my memory. I did dorky things in high school like memorizing 150 digits of pi. I often didn't need to study because I remembered details from class lectures. While I wouldn't say I had an amazing memory, it was pretty good. However, everything changed in the blink of an eye, and it terrified me. I would be speaking to someone and suddenly my mind would go blank, and I wouldn't remember what we had just been talking about two seconds ago. I would read a sentence from a book and have no memory or comprehension of it when I reached the period. Oh, I remembered most of the details of the event itself just fine--I certainly thought about the damn thing often enough--but I couldn't use my memory in day-to-day life.

As you can imagine, that really sucked as a student. I tried for three or four weeks to continue my coursework, but it just wasn't going to happen. I couldn't go to class because being in a room full of people I didn't know for two hours made me panic, and I couldn't do any of my reading. It destroyed me to have to go on medical leave, but I didn't really have a choice, and part of me knew it was for the best.

This summer, a year and a half later, I returned to college to complete my last four courses. I decided to divide them into two terms of two classes each (here the norm is 3 classes per 10-week term), and I am currently taking the last two courses of my undergraduate career (finally!). While my PTSD has certainly gotten much better, traces of it still remain. There are some evenings when I am pre-occupied--obsessed, even-- with thoughts about rape/sexual assault and I cannot do my work. Some days I am anxious, tense, really easily startled, and unable to give or receive any kind of physical contact. I still have terrible dreams where I wake up screaming sometimes. Some days I feel emotionally numb and detached, like a shell of my usually cheerful self. But things are getting better, and I have been able to return to a pretty normal life as a college student.

Most importantly, my memory and concentration are starting to return. They are still not as good as they used to be, but they are better. Being able to handle schoolwork again has been one of the most empowering things for me. Losing that was devastating, because I had built my life around academics. But now I'm back, and with an added vengeance-- I am starting to apply my love of learning and researching and writing to the issues of rape/sexual assault, with the hopes that I can make a difference somehow. Take that, trauma.

Triggers and Responses

*trigger warning*

I saw someone on campus today who looks like the man who raped me my senior spring. FML.

Let's talk about triggers.

A trigger is something that reminds a trauma survivor of the ordeal(s) he or she has endured. Triggers can be external or internal, consciously recognized or unconsciously internalized.

• External: A place, person, object, time of the day/month/year, story, etc. that is somehow related to the ordeal.
• Internal: A feeling, thought, physical memory, etc. that is somehow related to what happened.
• Consciously recognized: The trigger can be identified. You know what it is that is causing your reactions.
• Unconsciously internalized: When you don't know the cause of your physical and/or emotional response, when it seems to be happening for no reason. 

All of these are legitimate kinds of triggers. Here are some of my own personal triggers (in no particular order):

• Seeing someone who looks like him: short dark hair, slightly balding, large widow's peak, long oval-shaped face
• Being around someone who is tall, heavyset, and physically intimidating (think football player)
• Friday nights
• Any anniversary of March 25-26
  
• Being in the room where it happened, especially seeing the bench
• Hearing his name, or even just part of his name
• Mentions of rape/sexual assault in books, online, the news, or by people
• One particular sexual position
• Sharp pain during vaginal or anal intercourse
  
• Intrusive thoughts and memories of the event, of his face/body/voice
  

My responses to these triggers tend to be pretty universal. They have gotten better over time, thankfully. In the months following the assault, I had very sudden, intense physical and mental responses. I would abruptly go numb; my heart would start to pound; I would tense up and usually dig my nails into my palm or clutch a part of my shirt; and I would try to find somewhere in the room where I could curl up as small as possible with my back to something and still be able to see most of the room. Sometimes I would have hot flashes or cold flashes. I would be both disoriented and hyper-focused; disoriented because I felt detached, like somehow I wasn't in my own body, and hyper-focused because I was taking in every sound and every movement near me, and every stimulus was amplified, as if all my filters and protections were down.

Sometimes it would be a little different; I would become numb, detached, silent, and depressed. This type of response happened more when I was triggered by a solitary activity where I was already alone and quiet, such as reading. I found myself triggered by everything from academic treatments of sexual assault to fiction about trauma to normal novels that just had to put in references to rape and assault. I could feel myself sliding into that somber glass case, the walls closing in; I would start to shut down, feeling a heavy weight, a darkness, descend on me; I would be compelled to keep reading, thinking, feeling, remembering.

Time does help heal things a little bit. My responses are not quite so extreme anymore. They certainly still occur, but they no longer seize control of my life and force me to stop whatever I was doing to suffer for a surreal time.

I saw someone who looked like him yesterday, too. When my mind made note of him and started to flail, I pursed my lips with grim determination and settled for being a bit detached and depressed for a while. This morning, when I left the house to go to class, I saw someone else who looked like him. No idea if it was the same person or not. I started to panic, and walked a full block while thinking about him and the assault, but then I calmed down and everything got better.

Triggers-- I will probably always have them, but the best thing I can do is to learn to live with them.