PTSD, can the Ghost Hunters deal with My Ghost?

            Welcome to back to my blog, where it is the second day that I am going to start writing about how my day is, how my PTSD and DID effect me in my daily life. Although this started back in February 2010 and I do feel I have come somewhat a good distance I realized that I need to change the way I have been viewing my life let alone living it. If I continue to go down the road I have been on, it will take a lot longer to reach my recovery which is something I really want to strive for.

            Today was a good day with little flashbacks, some that were good and a couple that were just bad, not horrific. The one good memory I had came to me while I was watching television with my three year old son, which I must say kids programming is not like it used to be. In this particular cartoon they were playing with a bean bag toss trying to get the little bag through a hole. That took me back to my third grade class where we had to make a game and bring it into class and share it with the other classmates. For my game, my father took a piece of plywood and cut several holes into it while my mother made some bags filled with beans, thus a bean bag toss. It was so funny, because my teacher loved it so much she refused to allow me to bring it home. So needless to say my project that received a good grade was also left to grow old with my school. I don’t remember if I was upset or not, but I can imagine that I was because it was one thing that my parents and I worked on. So this to me is a good memory, one that I can laugh at even though it may have been bad to keep a third graders project. What can I say, it still is funny.

            The bad memories for today came while we were driving down town back on the way to my wife’s mother’s house so I could move some folders from her desktop to her laptop. As we passed places like the local flea market, I remembered going there with my parents. Why would I consider this a bad memory, because going out with my family was sometimes not the funniest thing to do in life, in fact it could be sometimes the most painful experience a child could have. My mother believed in discipline when you were doing something wrong no matter who looked or where it was. She would pinch pretty hard on the ear, armpit, behind the leg or anyplace she could find that would inflict pain to make us stop. For some reason looking at the flea market brought back memories of an old Polish Church we would attend, maybe because we would go to the market after church a lot almost like clock work. The church for me has very bad memories because some of the physical abuse took place by my brother in the church basement, in fact once I ended up going to the hospital by ambulance for stitches because he encouraged a cousin to fight me and I ended up getting hit over the head by a metal juice pitcher. The one nice thing about these were that they were not to serious or bad today, so even though I had them it was very easy to stay grounded and focus on something else. After spending 6 hours there, two of which I slept on the couch we came home to find the older kids had already gotten home from school. I brought my computer in the house, took it upstairs and plugged it in. I really feel proud that I am able to do this even if it is for a little while. After about three hours, I did end up going back downstairs and just had to get away from the light and confusion. I say light, because I am trying to stay upstairs with the curtain open because I am so afraid to be seen, go figure.

            But tonight I started thinking about something, a show one of the kids was watching last night. Something about ghost hunting and trying to capture ghosts on cameras or digital recorders to see if there was any paranormal activity in the area. I started thinking about my flashbacks, nightmares and my physical flashbacks that everyone gets plagued with when they are suffering from PTSD. And you know, I got thinking about my past and these ghosts that they are trying to find. There are a few things that I really compared together and what came together was rather interesting and almost made my PTSD sound not so bad as far as viewing it the way I did. When they are looking for paranormal experiences they are looking for ghosts, I have a ghost that haunts me that I call my past. When ghost appears or a voice is heard this is called paranormal activity, when my ghost appears or speaks to me it is called a flash back. And a quote taken from a paranormal web page “No one knows why some people respond physically (i.e. Goosebumps) to ghosts and paranormal activity,” which is a question why do people experience physical flashbacks? The fact is that we know that our innocence was killed when we were abused at a certain age but yet the child lives in a special part of our mind. This is especially true in people who develop Disassociation Identity Disorder. For example, for me I have Keith who is eight years old and for me my first remembrance of my first sexual abuse took place when I was eight years old. If my inner child was killed in this attack and part of that child now lives in my mind as an alter, part or if you will a ghost of the little child who I was. So by looking at it this way, it seems to lesson the stress of fearing a Flashback if I look at it like Paranormal Activity and call it Subconscious Activity, which it really is just that. The same can be looked at with Physical Flashbacks which is called physical paranormal activity I can relate that to Physical Subconscious Activity. All of this combined to me can now be called Subconscious Experience. To me in a way it makes it sound more like my subconscious that is reliving the past and I am only learning about it now. I fear it because like the paranormal it is the unknown, the lack of memories and the questions that arise from it all. Everything is hidden in our subconscious and when the wall comes down this ghost of our past is able to come forward and begin to explain to us what really happened.

            Yes, I know its kind of a far reach in looking at it this way but if you think about it is just all that. Flashbacks make it sound like something we cannot survive and yet we do, but the term subconscious activity lets me know that it is something that is going to happen, not to fear it because it is something that happened in the past and since I live today it is only a subconscious reminder. Yes, the pain and suffering that goes with it is our own conscious realizing what took place and mourning for that little child. The question is always, how someone can do that to a little child that way and how did we live is a question that plays over and over in our minds. Subconsciously we always new about it, its only now as we embark on our road to recovery that we learn about the past from our own selves. Until Next Time…