Cats, Dogs & Tangled Threads
Complex-PTSD on Traumatic Brain Injury
“You know how you get scared or worried or nervous but you don’t want to be scared or worried or nervous so you push it to the back of your mind? You try not to think about it… It’s like a filter in your brain that keeps your feelings in check.
She feels everything.
She can’t not.”
~Simon Tam, on speaking of his sister, River, and her damaged brain, Firefly.1
This one’s gruesome, too. Just about anytime we’re dealing with PTSD around here, it could get gruesome. Domestic violence, sexual assault, bodily injury, and a bashed, battered mind tearing itself apart as it tries to patch itself back together... As I said before:
You might not wanna watch. And please always remember that I’m a martial artist. Some people say I hit too hard with this stuff. Other people thank me for Telling It Like It Is because they’ve never been able to find the words to explain it, so you’ll have to discern where you sit on that spectrum. If you’re sensitive to this stuff, my delivery may not be for you.
But if you don’t KNOW, you can’t know. Unless those of us who do know finally speak about it.
Just like there is a difference between, “Oh, yeah, I had a concussion, too,” (past tense) versus protracted or even permanent Traumatic Brain Injury, there is also a difference between Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex-PTSD.2 They’re only just starting to figure out where the C-PTSD diagnosis fits in the whole gamut of trauma-based psych stuff. There’s a lot of arguing, researching, testing, and discussing going on about it.
They’ll figure it out. Eventually. And then probably change it three years later as they learn more about it. Like they do.
The way it was explained to me by one of my combat vet buddies was: You might develop PTSD from getting your jeep blown up in an IED. You’d be more likely to develop C-PTSD if you got your jeep blown up in an IED, held your buddy as he gasped out his last in your arms, and then got yoinked into a nightmare POW situation for five years, finally returned, got attacked in the airport for being a “baby killer,” only to learn that they declared you dead, so your wife married your best friend and your kids now prefer him as a dad.
PTSD comes from a one-off trauma. C-PTSD comes from multi-layered and protracted traumas.
That’s not to say one is necessarily “worse” than the other. Comparing and one-upping these things is really unhelpful. They’re just slightly different animals that require some different angles of approach to live with and to treat.3 The impact they have is totally dependent upon the person experiencing them.
For example, someone with lots of money, resources, support, no previous injuries or traumas, a bomb-proof nervous system, and a laid-back personality might weather Severe TBI more easily and pleasantly than the impact “one little bump on the head” has upon the destitute, unemployed, isolated person with arthritis, lupus, lung cancer, and a lifelong history of violent abuse on their ADHD nervous system.
Everything deserves compassion.
Everything deserves support.
Period.
So. My story.
I acquired PTSD from being hit by a drunk driver, just like I had acquired PTSD every time I was sexually assaulted and experienced domestic violence. Every one of those episodes incited long, deep traumatic shockwaves in the aftermath, whereas that time I almost drowned when I was four had a much briefer impact.
My PTSD triggering about bodies of water bigger than my bathtub ended abruptly in first grade, the second I realized that I knew how to swim.
In contrast, the time I survived a tornado while I was camping4 didn’t cause any PTSD at all. It was terrifying. I was battered and bruised afterwards. I got French-kissed by Death, but it didn’t traumatize me. I was well supported in the aftermath, and the incident itself included deep bonding because I’d gotten to help a dear friend through it. It also didn’t create any lasting injuries. In fact, the injuries I did sustain actually ignited one of the most sweeping love-affairs of my life when a gorgeous fighter introduced me to Tiger Balm. So yes, I’m wary of tornadoes. But they don’t freak me out the way simply passing by the Uintah Street exit did EVERY. SINGLE. TIME for years.
If my second rear-ending in 2014 had been a standalone episode, it may not have triggered PTSD at all. I simply got thrown into my seatbelt at a stop sign. Would it have given me a concussion and whiplash? Maybe. It didn’t injure my driver.
What made that incident traumatizing was that I’d already been through severe whiplash and three previous brain traumas, as well as the years of hell that my first car wreck had wreaked upon my life, so this minor fender-bender just exacerbated all those old injuries and brought the triggers screaming back.
It also sent me into another post-concussion spiral, during which I unwittingly signed a ludicrous contract with the literary agent I would end up firing a couple years later.
That’s the difference with C-PTSD. The prolonged and repetitive traumas. It can be the same trauma over and over, or it can be one type of trauma after another after another. The key is that it happens over an extended period and builds up in messy layers.
One of my trauma therapists likened it to a sticky-trap for flies. Single-incident PTSD creates the sticky trap. After that, it’s easier for any other traumas to stick to it. Even the smallest insects can start to pile up and make a mess. (Gross.)
Since I have TBI on top of that, I have a different way of imagining it.
You have a box of thread spools, right? Doy, of course you do, because you like to sew. One of those spools gets knocked out of the box, unwound and tangled. It gets shoved back in the box before it can be properly wound back up. That loose thread is likely to get twined around perfectly wound spools and make a mess if you don’t address that one derelict hue, especially if your box tends to get shaken up a lot by the conditions of your life.
This is your brain on PTSD.
Then you have C-PTSD.
At various times, a number of different threads have been knocked out and unwound, then shoved back into your box. Along come the cats—adorable assholes that they are. (Today, C is for Cats because they’re Complex and they are masterful at making messes.) Those little twit-heads get in there with all their diabolical glee and start batting the spools around until the various colors are all tangled up and knotted.
But they’re still in the box.
If you have a really good lid and a life that doesn’t make you have to handle that old box a lot, those suckers could stay in there and nobody would ever know what a mess you have.
Heck, bury the box deep enough into the handy-dandy dungeon of your mind and you might not even know about this mess yourself.
That would be me in 2000, prior to the drunk driver.
I’d seen a few things that were in that box once. Nope-nope-nope! I sealed that thing up, buried it in the back of the freezer, and hauled the freezer down into the dungeon behind the big armor-plated, multi-lock door with the sign that read, “DO NOT OPEN ME. EVER. NOT EVEN IN EMERGENCY, FUCKER.”
Now add Frontal Lobe Damage to that mess.5
D is for Damage.
D is also for Dog.
The Dog—an even bigger and funnier asshole than the Cats—decides it would be super-duper fun to unearth your box from where it was buried, drag it into the kitchen, and upend it across the tiles. The Cats agree. They batta-batta those spools all over the room, further tangling them around the legs of the chairs and table and under the stove—wheeeeee!
Somebody finds it hi-flippin’-larious to hack up a hairball in the middle of it.
Somebody else (not naming names, ahem) decides the art project is not complete unless he’s dragged his dingleberry butt across the few open spots left on the floor that anybody could safely step on.
And here I come, bleary-eyed and shuffling in my bunny slippers, to make my morning coffee.
Yup.
Complex PTSD on Frontal Lobe Damage.
🤘 Woot. 🤘
Oh, you’re still here? Let’s look at it in real time.
January 8, 2001
28 years old
19 days after the crash
“I’m just so sick of it!” I snarl across my kitchen table.
My father’s eyes are two large buttons of shock. I’d really like to pet him, hug him, tell him, “It’ll be okay, Daddy. I’ll be okay once I get to puke all this out.”
But I know that’s not accurate. I’m watching myself go off about this—have been watching myself go off since we sat down for a nice round of daddy-daughter donuts.
Instead, it’s THIS again.
He asked me how I felt this morning. That’s all.
Big mistake.
Because I will answer.
Now with Dain Bramage, I can’t not answer in too-detailed and uncensored honesty. Once asked the question, the deluge gushes from my mouth. If only that were the case when I wanted to speak words, but no. Of course not. Then it’s “stutter-stutter-glitch-ummmm…”6
Not this morning. Today I can’t halt the flood of face-melting, acidic bile. It sprays all over the kitchen table and our nice Dunkin’ Donuts that he got for us before I was able to haul myself up from the festering dregs of my nightly coma. Lucky for Mom, she’s in the shower.
My poor father.
One little piece of me sits chained and gagged in the back of the movie theater, watching the onscreen antics but incapable of influencing a single thing.
I rant. I rail. I snarl. I wail. I froth and foam and go on and on about the putrid snowball of my life rolling down the mountainside, picking up speed as well as issues of complaint with every revolution. It all gets mashed up into one big ball of SUCK.
The headlights in my rear-view mirror. The catapult stone slamming through my bumper into the base of my spine. The energy rippling up that lash-shaped collection of bones to whip my skull forward and
CRACK!
My face slams down into the mattress. My jammie pants are yanked down. Thrashing and screaming and screeching bloody murder as his hand pulls back and
WHAM!
His ram-rod pulverizing my cervix as my cheek and lips are ground into the carpet with my pants cinched tight around my ankles. I try to buck up but he shoves me back down and
BLAM!
My face slamming into the locker and the laughter as her painted nails gouge my shoulder. She whips me back around to shove me again and
BOOM!
My head flies into the driver’s side door and
WHAM!
Her hands bash my chest. I scrabble for the railing but it slips from my grip and the world disappears from beneath me and
CR-THUD!
The skin of my naked ass-back-shoulders breaks through the ice crusting the snow and for a second, there’s nothing but the winter sky and his icicle-snide laughter as the door slams shut, locks me out in the cold and
The orange dashboard lights and the black sky.
The fluorescent lights and the gray ceiling.
The ice-frosted clouds.
The spiraling, whirling, greenish-gray sky.
The whirling stars and streetlights…
It all blends together in a tangled mess I can’t decipher, and when one of those images strikes, it’s sure to be dragging three others in its wake. It’s all one giant snowball rolling down the mountainside to steam-roll me.
“EVERY FUCKING TIME!” I roar into the morning sunbeams warming my kitchen. “It always comes from behind! BLAM! Somebody’s always gotta be back there, fucking around and waiting for the moment my guard is down so they can just…”
My fist slams into my palm because one movement is worth a thousand words.
Stupid words get jammed up my too-small pipes anyway, now that I have so much trouble speaking. I wouldn’t be able to get them out my mouth fast enough before the next image needs to be regurgitated.
But I can’t. I’ve never told my dad about That One Thing. And especially That Other Thing. He still lives in the same town as that motherfucker—and he’s a dad. I really don’t want to see him in prison for running across my rapist and hearing the asshole say, “Heeeeey! How ya been? Tell your daughter hi for me.”
But today I can’t stop the stupid words.
“It never fails! Just grab me by the back of the neck and slam me down, face first, so you can give it to me gooooood! Had enough yet? Nope? Well, here ya go, kid! Another round of ramming for ya! We’ll tie your hands behind your back this time! How ‘bout that? Oh, still haven’t had enough? How about about a drunk driver, an uncaring emergency room, and the DA’s office who found you so unworthy of consideration they couldn’t even mention your name in the DUI case so shut the fuck up, bend over, and take it! UGH!”
On and on and on and on, trapped inside the Rabid Hamster Wheel of Doom until I finally lose the ability to sort jagged jumbles into words for one blessed second.
My brain buffers.
I gnash my teeth.
Glance up.
My father’s eyes are huge. I wonder if my head has been spinning around. There is green puke all over the table between us. Maybe nobody else can see it, but I can. Guaranteed he can, too. Horror roils in his gaze. He’s never looked at me that way.
I don’t blame him.
I’m horrified myself, especially up there in the back row where I’m being force-fed popcorn with my wrists zip-tied to the armrests of this chair in the circus-monkey crap-throwing tent.
a.k.a. My Life.
Dad’s jaw is tight. His brows furrow. “You know…it really seems like there is a whole lot more going on here than just this car wreck.”
This time, my head does spin around. The reeking green mass surges up my throat like a firehose set free from its kink:
“That’s because THERE ISSSSSSSSSS!”
Yeah. One of my favorite memories ever.
Alas. That one conveniently never got lost to the TBI gremlins swiping them overnight.
Honestly, that’s probably a good thing, because if I remember it, it means that I can deal with it. There were a lot of things I had no clue were happening after that car wreck until many years later when I went back and finally read my journals.
Then lost the memories again until I finally read my journals.
Then lost those memories again until I finally read my journals and they stuck.7
When my brain was damaged, I not only lost my ability to reliably and consistently make accessible memories, to choose what came out of my mouth, or to choose whether or not an emotion needed to be expressed RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND AT FULL BLAST!
But I also lost the ability to compartmentalize emotions or thoughts so that I could function in my day-to-day life. We do that all day. So we can go to work. Take care of the kids. Operate the motor vehicle. Enjoy the party.
Not me.
Not anymore.
Horrific memories began pummeling me hour after hour, whether or not I was awake. At twenty-eight, I had very few tools to deal with this gruesome floodgate. Neither did I have the money to pay out-of-pocket for the expensive specialty of trauma therapy—a treatment that wasn't covered by insurance back in those days.
Every traumatic episode I’d ever experienced twined with anything remotely similar. It created a constant, relentless storm made up of:
Every traumatic memory I’d ever tried to forget.
The background virus of every repressed trauma my brain had locked inside the Lost Tomes and buried in the Dungeon.
Everything from my current life that I didn’t want to think about.
Then out of nowhere…
Sunlight.
The soft breeze upon my face.
The flooding return of my customary relish in every glorious scent, taste, color, sound and sensation life has to offer.
A song. The dreams of a dance. A bird hopping from the sidewalk into my cupped palms. The flickering glow of candlelight. The sweetness of a donut and the fact that my dad really did give a shit—that he wanted to help m so badly, and hated that he just couldn’t. The caress of deft fingers on strings or in my hair on the days when I could tolerate being touched. The thrill of butterfly wings in my breast over something incredible that I’d just learned. The swoon through my exhausted, overloaded brain at the scent of sandalwood-and-amber. The bliss of my cat’s silky fur and the loving bonk of his noggin against mine. Gazing into each other’s eyes as we purred together….
Those are the things that got me through it every time the storm came raging through the landscape of my mind.
Now this quote will probably make much more sense, even if you haven’t seen the shows:
“You know how you get scared or worried or nervous but you don’t want to be scared or worried or nervous so you push it to the back of your mind? You try not to think about it… It’s like a filter in your brain that keeps your feelings in check.
She feels everything.
She can’t not.”
~Simon Tam, on speaking of his sister, River, and her damaged brain, Firefly.
YES. Firefly & Serenity nailed it. This is how it feels. And yes. Just like with River, remembering and putting it all into order, understanding the sequences of the how’s and where’s and who’s and why’s…detangling that box of spools and re-storing them in an organized manner…
It absolutely helps to calm the storm:
UP NEXT: SHOCKWAVE CITY - Inside my first seizures.
© 2020 Hartebeast
The more of a Browncoat you are, the more you’ll understand this piece. Wait, what’s a Browncoat?! What’s a—?! The TV series Firefly and its bonus movie, Serenity - because TV execs just can’t help themselves. They gotta not trust writers and put stuff out of order, omit other important stuff, ya know.
It’s no wonder that these characters are so intimately entwined with how I came to understand what was happening in my brain, because I fell in love with this series while it briefly aired during the early years after my big car wreck. Then one night—zwoop! It was gone. Sacrilege. Browncoats Untie! (I mean…unite. Stupid lyzdexia.) 😜
(Lyzdexia: my catchall snarky term for all the things my brains reverse. Letters and numbers when I read and write, words or parts of words when I speak, left and right, black and white, forward and back, entire sections of a menu or poster...)
Example: EMDR, EMDr & EMD - when my first neuropsychologist treated me in the months after I was hit by a drunk driver, this technique had slightly different variations from the way it was applied in the 2 years I used it to treat my C-PTSD. There’s also a very big difference in a practitioner who has completed the initial courses, versus someone with the full certification. When I returned to EMDR in 2020, my practitioner eventually had to send me up the chain of command to someone with the full certification, due to the level of dissociation and dysregulation involved in my case.
I’ll have to answer - I can’t not. I’ve covered what I mean by this in my post about Discovering Dain Bramage.
Think-It-Say-It Syndrome - and other Impulsivity & Disinhibition issues after TBI
“ I got French-kissed by Death” — great phrase, I am definitely going to steal that hahaha.
Also the spools of thread and then the pesky cats and dogs batting them about and digging them up — was a fantastic analogy for how to describe Complex PTSD. It gave me a much clearer way to understand it.
I also really like how you ended this piece — with the things that got you through. Those little glimmers of light, tnay become so much more appreciated. :)
It takes a lot to share so openly. Thank you for your candor.