 Hello there, my beautiful lovely internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. It is delightful to see you here where today we are going to be talking about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And yes, I am a little overly animated at the beginning of this video because I did just eat an entire box of macaroni and cheese all by myself. And yes, this is coffee. I've mentioned more than once in passing on this channel that I've dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder, otherwise known as PTSD. I was diagnosed a number of years ago, but I've always brushed over it. I've never talked in depth about what that has been like, how it still presently affects me, and what led to that diagnosis, like what actually happened. On screen right now you're going to see a few content warnings of some subjects we will be brushing upon in this video. If you do not feel like hearing about any of these, click the link down below. I have placed a very cute puppy video just for you instead. As we dive in here today, I do want to give a big thank you to our sponsor, Surfshark. I really appreciate sponsors, especially on videos like this, talking about mental health because generally they get demonetized. So a quick word about them as we get started. Surfshark VPN is a service that allows you to safely and securely browse the internet to your heart's content while keeping your identity and information safe. As we all know from the office, identity theft is not a joke, Jim, and it really isn't a joke. Identity theft is a huge issue, costs people hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, and using a VPN can help keep you and your information safe. Now, if that's not thrilling enough for you, it also allows you access to a lot more entertainment. For instance, if that show you love is no longer available on Netflix, just change your country through your VPN, connect through Germany or Japan. And suddenly, because entertainment is licensed differently in different countries, you're able to watch that show again. I don't highly recommend using them as I use them myself. Now, if you use the link in the description down below, you can get 83% off. That is quite the deal. I appreciate you giving it to my audience, Surfshark. So stay safe on the web. Check it out down below and let us continue with the video. So if it's all right with you, I'm gonna sip some coffee and I'm gonna tell you my story. The year was 2010 when I returned back to Colorado from a school I was attending in Indiana because of health issues. When I got back here, I was very lost, very lonely. I loved it out there. It felt like home. Colorado was not for me, but I was stuck here and I ended up getting involved in a house church that people I had known for a long time were running. Pretty soon after starting to attend regularly, I struck up a friendship with one of the leaders. He was a good few years older than me and we started chatting and hanging out and he was a really interesting guy. He was very hard to get to know. He was very mysterious, which at that point in my life was something that was kind of attractive because like, who are you really? Let me get to know you, right? So this friendship turned romantic very quickly and from the very first moment that we were actually alone together, there were red flags like him not respecting me saying no to things because at that point I was a sheltered little Christian girl and even kissing felt like going too far, but he was a leader. He was someone I saw as a pastor. I trusted him. I understood that, you know, men struggle with this kind of thing and it was probably something I was wearing or something I was doing and so that was my fault. We had a conversation about it. It's not going to happen again. He's going to listen to me the next time I say no to something. Okay, great, but as you might know, that's not how these situations go. And so as time progressed, things got worse and worse and worse. My boundaries, my physical boundaries were never actually respected. He continued pushing and pushing and using a lot of spiritual and emotional manipulation. It was a very bad relationship with a very messed up power dynamic that got increasingly more, especially sexually abusive as time went on and oh, so very spiritually manipulative. And the thing was, at this point in my life, my faith was my entire world. Like, following God was all I cared about and serving him and serving his people and so that was very much used against me. I'm going to spare you and me from having to relive all of the details, but a long story made short, in October of 2011, he raped me not for the first time, but the circumstances surrounding that particular instance finally became clear to me that something was really wrong. I felt like something broke in me. I remember literally driving away and feeling like I had split down the middle. Like, there was a piece of me that was like, that's totally fine. Everything's fine. It's a misunderstanding. You probably did something wrong. Then there was another half of me that was gutterly screaming, something is wrong. And I'm really grateful that in that one moment, I was able to listen to the side of me that was screaming and did recognize something wasn't right here. I didn't recognize the extent of it, but I was aware of it enough to exit that relationship. Trauma is a very funny beast. I look back at the first few weeks and few months after the worst of what happened and I was unbelievably not okay. I did end up going to the police. I did press charges. Nothing came of it because as I was told from the district attorney, juries don't really believe women in cases like this and you don't have hard evidence. So we're not going to do anything with it, which was very disappointing to say the least. Now, another piece of the story is that later I found out that I was by no means the first person that this guy had assaulted. He had six other restraining orders against him, which is a lot of restraining orders. Two convictions of domestic violence was literally in the midst of another sexual assault case against a minor. Like, we're talking legit sociopaths' gum of the earth, but looking back, I am so incredibly glad that I was able to exit that relationship when I did. And there aren't words descriptive enough to tell you how broken I was in the weeks and months following that event and leaving that relationship. Like, I was a different person. I legitimately considered getting a gravestone tattoo with that date because it was so significant to me that I was no longer here. The Joe before that moment was dead. She was gone and now I was here in this horrible, awful world that had just been exploded for me. I was previously of the illusion that the world was a safe place. People were good. God would always take care of me. Everything was going to be all right. And suddenly all of that was called into question. The community that I had at that time did a good job of trying to support me, but was not equipped to actually give me what I needed. I had a lot of very poor experiences with people telling them what had happened and having my experience denied or minimized, having my feelings minimized, being told to get over it. I was very involved in this whole thriving, alive community. And suddenly, I wasn't suddenly. I was different. I was an outsider. I felt that way. And as time went on pretty quickly, I was thinking about ending my life like all the time, like every single day. Sincerely, the only reason I didn't is because of this dog. You see right here. I got a German Shepherd because it felt very unsafe and also I love dogs and she is the greatest blessing of my life at that point. And someone needed to feed her. So I kept coming home and not driving my car off a bridge, which I'm very grateful for. And so eventually I started going to see a counselor. Not too long into our sessions together, she asked me if I'd ever heard of something called PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And I said, isn't that what soldiers get from war? And she said, yes, sometimes. And also it's what a lot of sexual assault survivors experience as well. At that point, I was having nightmares just about every night. I was hyper-vigilant to, oh my God, an extreme. I think of some of the things that I did and some of the things that I thought and how ridiculously on guard and aware I was in every moment. And I almost have to laugh because it was so extreme. It was understandable given the experiences that I had. I started suffering from significant depression and panic attacks and felt so isolated and disconnected and just dead inside, but also feeling everything at the same time. So after a number of our sessions together, she said, you know, you have post-traumatic stress disorder. This is what you're dealing with. And at that point, it was honestly kind of a relief to hear because I felt like I was losing my mind. I felt like I was a crazy person. And being able to have a name for the state of mind that I was in was amazing. Knowing that other people experienced things like when they saw a certain color or someone smelling a certain way were suddenly back in the worst moment of their lives and just started to panic. Like I was glad to know that flashbacks are actually a thing that happened to people and I wasn't the only one. PTSD made me isolate a whole lot, which is not super helpful when you're trying to heal from something. However, it felt like it kept me safe. Staying inside and not being around people and not talking to people and being in a controlled environment with my German Shepherd next to me. Like I was still stuck with my brain, meaning that I felt like I was in hell, but at least I didn't have to deal with all the additional input and the triggers and the tension and the things I needed to be vigilant about. And so I isolated, which was a very dangerous thing to do with my brain and the position that it was in. And a big part of surviving that was the friends who didn't ditch me because I didn't respond to their texts for weeks on end. I remember napping a lot at that time in my life, which might sound like a weird thing to mention, but my brain was so constantly overwhelmed and in like hyperdrive that I was so exhausted. Like we're not meant to feel like we are an imminent danger. Most moments of the day. So physically my immune system was trash. I got sick a lot. I still get sick a lot, but a little bit less than back then. When I experienced triggers or flashbacks or just the anxiety or panic attacks, it's so hard on your body. Like living through trauma is not only mentally difficult, but it literally changes you biologically, which is bizarre. Like it can change how chemicals are produced in your brain. Can, as it did with me, just trash your immune system because you are under such stress. I felt so detached from my mind and my body in particular, but I also didn't have a whole lot of desire to actually be attached. Like the numbness was overwhelming, but not being numb was too painful. So it's kind of a double-edged sword. So I got that diagnosis of PTSD. And what that has looked like for me over the years has shifted quite a bit. It frustrates me sometimes that being triggered is such a commonly used term now that is no longer associated with trauma. But the way that it was used when I was diagnosed anyways, it had to do with actually having a trauma trigger as in something that brought you back to the moment of trauma, feeling all those visible sensations, you know, the panic, all of that. And in the beginning, there were so many of those for me. Seeing people who I knew knew him, pure and just utter panic. I was like the most trusting person in the world before this, but after I was suspicious of literally everybody and I do mean everyone, that one has taken a long time to work out of. And I will be honest, I am still pretty guarded. Even though to most people I appear like a fairly open book, it is still hard to not kind of always have a little bit of a wall between me and other people. The nightmares that I had the first few years in particular were horrific. You probably know this, but when you can't get good sleep, it affects the rest of your mental health. And so I almost think the nightmare portion of PTSD is one of the most brutal ones because there's nowhere that's safe. Like the world doesn't feel safe when you're awake, but it sure as hell does not feel safe when you're asleep because your brain just attacks you with these subconscious demons. One of the most important things I could ever say about PTSD is it gets better. It gets better with work and with time. And I did put in that work and I have taken that time and I am a significantly better place than I was. I can't even begin to state how different of a person I feel now than even three, four, five years ago. It was only this past October. I made a video about this. I'll link it that I was able to go back to the city where that happened alone and felt okay. It's like nine years after a few months ago out of absolutely nowhere, I had a really bad trigger where my husband did something playful when we were in our kitchen. We were literally just like joking and playing around and he said something and like, like that all of a sudden. I'm not sure if this will make sense, but I literally saw our house as the house where those things happened to me. Like we have hardwood floors everywhere, but like I was seeing pink carpet and I realized I could still see that the floors were wood, but like my brain was telling me, their pink carpet, get the hell out of here. But honestly, that's the only significant flashback I've had in like a year. Aside from that, I have small moments of getting very overwhelmed with the subject or the topic. People say something that's particularly insensitive. Occasionally I have a very difficult time, but I'm at a place now where the nightmares are pretty well under control. A lot of my triggers are worked out, we're good there, but the hypervigilance is one that's very difficult. Like being aware of every door and every window, every entry and every exit, always knowing where my back is, being very aware of who's in the room, who's out of the room, knowing if someone comes up behind me, freaking out if I can't tell that they're there. Like that hasn't quite gone away. So when anyone asked me about healing from or getting better with PTSD, there are two things I always recommend. The first is a trauma-informed therapist worked amazingly well for me and I was grateful to have access. And secondly, a therapy treatment called EMDR. It's eye movement desensitization, EMD, eye movement desensitization. The R stands for something as well. I'm gonna put it on screen and look like an idiot as I'm saying this. But it is this ridiculous sounding thing where you're like moving your eyes back and forth following a light bar and maybe holding things that vibrate in your hand like as you're going back and forth as you're kind of processing through some things. And oh my God, it worked incredibly well to dampen the severity of some of the flashbacks that I was having and start helping me feel like a real person again. It was amazing. And aside from that, figuring out my identity as this new person, because I do still feel like to some extent there was the before Joe and the after Joe. I realized we're the same person. I realized that Joe didn't die. But I lost so much of my identity and my community and who I was, not only with what happened, but everything surrounding the relationship and a lot of things that happened after leaving that relationship that it's taken years to figure out who I am, what I like and what I don't like, things that bring me joy and things that don't bring me joy anymore. Just who I want to aim to be and that has been discovered by lots of experimentation and trying new things. I fought an MMA for two years and that was incredibly healing to me. And I've done jiu-jitsu and yoga and art and rock climbing and a lot of journaling, some coding, a lot of time hanging out with animals. Just trying to figure out what makes me feel alive and what's worth staying alive for. This could be a whole video in itself, but the relationships specifically my marriage, especially in the beginning, I really had to fight for because PTSD is just a beast. It is an absolute agonizing thing, especially when your trauma is related to a relationship and you're in a new relationship that is healthy. But you still have tons of triggers and it's not the new person's fault, but it's a challenge to work through and Brian is an absolute rock star and has really honestly helped me through so much of this. Finding safe people to talk to is also so important. And let me tell you, when I say that that takes a while, I really mean it can take a while. It took me years to find people who were really like my people, who were really safe for me to be around, to talk to, to actually be authentic, to say real things. Like people who were there to support me. I had some very good friends who have been with me through the whole thing and they are incredible. For a long time there, I found it really important to connect with other survivors of this type of trauma so that I didn't feel so damn alone and weird and broken and crazy and talking to people who have been there, talking to people who were a little bit further along in their healing process, talking to people who are maybe just coming out of something like this and realizing that you have something to give them, you have something to offer them because you've healed a little bit. I will say people tell me all the time and are very generous about telling me how inspirational I am for going through the loss of my limb and how I've gone through that and all of that. But I cannot tell you, and you guys have seen on this channel how difficult it has been at some moments. I cannot tell you how much harder it was to survive that trauma, the aftermath of that trauma, the PTSD, the depression, the suicidal thoughts, the panic attacks, the nightmares, the triggers, the flashbacks, so much harder, so much harder than losing a limb. And I think part of that is probably that I gained a lot of skills in the process of healing from that, that I was able to take with me into this other major deal of losing my leg. But people look at amputees and are like, wow, that's so heroic to still be living life like that or wow, that's really inspirational. But man, people who can survive and fight through mental health challenges are, in my personal experience and only my experience, it's so much harder, so much harder to do. One of the best things that was ever said to me about some of the symptoms of PTSD as I feel like I'm losing my mind is that you're having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. When humans experience these life-altering, mind-changing events that leave us with mental and or physical scars, it is very understandable that our minds and our bodies are changed, that we have reactions that might not make sense, reactions that might not make sense to us or other people, but are understandable given the trauma that we have gone through. Learning to accept that allowed me to have some compassion towards myself and instead of berating myself for this trauma brain that I was living in, it started to allow me to not see myself as someone who got very hurt and was simply healing. Like I said, I definitely still deal with some of the symptoms of PTSD depending on the day, depending on the time, depending on the year, but it is no longer the thing in my life. It's no longer a controlling force or factor. It's something I'm aware of and occasionally pops back up and I have to process it and cope with it and continue on. The first number of months and I would even say the first couple of years, I was very convinced that I was always going to feel this way. I was always going to feel so empty and terrified and unsafe and vigilant and have nightmares and triggers and just feel like an alien and feel horrible, just awful. And it's not true. That's not true. If you find yourself dealing with something whether it's mental health, physical health, whatever it is and you find yourself in a really dark mental space, I can tell you from personal experience, I promise you there is a way that it can get better. It can take time. It can take hard work. It may take trying a variety of different things, but you are not going to feel this way forever. It really does get better and you just have to keep going to sleep and waking up, doing one more day, one more step at a time, working slowly but surely forward and you will find your way out of the muck. Thank you so much for listening to my story. I truly really appreciate it. You guys mean the world to me, all of you. It amazes me that you'd be willing to take however many minutes this video is, maybe 20, 20 minutes out of your day to listen to me. Thank you. I hope you're doing well. I hope you're taking care of yourself. Big thank you again to Surfshark for making this video possible and to my patrons, my incredible gracious patrons for supporting this channel. And to you watching this video right now, you could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else. You chose to hang out with me for a few minutes and that means the world to me. Thank you. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.