It’s a Sunday here.
I am now able to take a curious observer stance of someone coming out of a several decades of PTSD and hyper vigilance. I have wondered why I’m so tired, so exhausted on some days.
“It is normal for the body to feel exhausted once it starts to feel safe if the body has been in a state of hyper vigilance for days, weeks, months, years, decades. That means the body has been running on super high levels of cortisol and adrenaline which it was not meant to do for that amount of time.
It takes time for the body to recover and recuperate and get used to this new feeling of safety. Go easy on yourself and give yourself lots of compassion.”
-Kelly Vincent, Psy.D
I am going to try and record what it looks like to slowly recover from hyper vigilance in that it might help someone else. Also, so I feel less of the “why haven’t I been doing this all along?” energy.
I’ve developed some habits over the years that aren’t serving me or anyone else well. I’ve been aware of them for years on some level but unable to really deal. With energy and safety blooming consistently for the first time in decades, I have some energy to look at these things and mainly, start to get over myself.
I’ve accepted that deep trauma creates a series of behaviors that are about protection of yourself, but are not ultimately helpful for human flourishing. Primary mental energy focused on staying safe is a tough way to go through the world, y’all.
When we went to Europe with our kids for the first (and only) time, I found a book in a used book store in Edinburgh that was a kid’s book on the history of the UK. I spent time on the trip getting the highlights and my general takeaway was this: centuries and millennia of endless wars up and down the island kept civilization at a standstill. When men went away from villages and cities to war, every thing in the village as far as progress, maintenance, stability, relationship formation, it all stopped.
Sometimes the elderly, women and children were able to maintain crops and the general health of the society. Often they could not. Lack of food, sickness and the like descended.
I’ve never forgotten this understanding. War may be trying to accomplish something important on a grand scale (or often not), but the destruction from the complete neglect of what was behind always happens.
I think about this often when I was more aware of the impact PTSD had on my overall life. It is hard to begin a new side hustle, exercise, what have you, when your focus is safety. When you also feel at war. Your own internal crops and body can wither, relations are usually affected, and the cost of your internal war plays out as time goes by. Your primary struggle and focus absorbs your time, but the collateral damage became more clear to me as time went by.
Things I figured I wasn’t doing because of work or life responsibilities, no it was mostly the energy toll hyper vigilance was taking.
I talked this weekend w/ Jay about the cost of hyper vigilance on stress management. That survival stress management looks different than stress management you gain over time for stressful situations that arise.
Ultimately, the stressors of PTSD need to be addressed and healed, removed, feel safety from. Learning better stress management skills has helped with my recovery and will serve me in the future. But ultimately I needed my life to fundamentally change.
Patrick Stewart dedicates charitable resources to among other things, people with PTSD as well as victims of domestic violence. His father had PTSD from the war and his mother was the target. He speaks of both as a tragedy of circumstance. He wants to help people in similar situations.
I guess that’s how I view it. This is what you got, now what will you do with it? Hopefully understand, then heal and change.
So for now, this space for me will be a place to document the transition out of hyper vigilance, what that feels like internally and how it looks externally.