Things are good!!

At the end of September 2012, I emailed my support group:

Whew, what a day!

It started with me oversleeping and having to race out of the house to get to my appointment with the psychiatrist. This was a follow-up appointment and it went really well. After a somewhat rocky start with nausea and two days in a row of migraines, I'm not only tolerating the zoloft well, but I'm beginning to reap the benefits of it, which are nothing short of amazing to me. The anxiety is pretty much gone; I've been sleeping better, without nightmares; I've felt much more optimistic; I seem better able to handle the emotional ups and downs of life. I know that I'm not yet experiencing the full effects but even now I feel so much more stable than I ever have.

On Monday, I started taking vyvanse, my new ADD med. It's been fairly amazing too. I knew I struggled a lot, but I had no idea how much. I went into the p-doc with a written list of all the improvements I'd noticed and he kept saying, "Your meds are working exactly the way they are supposed to." He started me on the lowest dose of vyvanse, so he upped it a little and also prescribed me a shorter acting med to take in the later afternoon right before the vyvanse starts wearing off.

I left feeling hugely encouraged.

Then I got home. My husband had taken the day off, and he and our two youngest boys were waiting for me, wanting to have a serious talk. Uh oh. Once I realized what they wanted to talk about, I actually felt somewhat relieved, because this conversation has been long overdue. I ended up explaining everything to them...that I had been raped in my early 20's...that I had PTSD and what that meant...why I have been seeing a therapist...that I had recently been tested and diagnosed with ADD...that I was on new meds...and then I let them ask any questions that they wanted to ask. We talked about all sorts of stuff, including my drinking (which has been way better, by the way...) The only thing I didn't tell them about is the incest. They had figured out some of the stuff on their own, just by living with me. (It's kinda obvious I have PTSD. Duh!) I apologized to both boys about not being more open with them, and we talked about my family's legacy of secrecy and how I am trying to overcome that. It was a great talk!! Randy would be so proud of us!

After that, we ate hamburgers and made all sorts of jokes about getting diagnosed with a variety of learning disorders and quirky syndromes so that we could have excuses for all our behaviors.

Then we did work around the house. My husband and I even tackled a project that, before the vyvanse, would have so overwhelmed me that I would have had a terrible meltdown. Instead, I worked away with him as if I was an almost normal person in a good mood! It was so shockingly different than the old me that we couldn't help commenting on it.

I slept fairly well last night.

This morning I keep thinking about all the positive changes in my life lately. Our marriage still needs work, but it is the best it has ever been. It looks like I've found the right meds for my PTSD and my ADD. Our family is becoming more and more connected and open...and a lot of healing is taking place. Good, good stuff! God is really working.

At the same time, it's kinda scary. But, then again, everything is kinda scary to me!

 

Thoughts about my new diagnosis

Written in September 2013:

I've been mulling over what the diagnosis of ADD means to me, and why I have this huge jumble of emotions about it.

In a big way, it's a huge relief. It's something I would suspect, but then I would tell myself, "It's all in your imagination. Your real problem is that you are stupid, lazy, etc., etc."

Now I know a lot of that stuff was not my fault. And, it seems like I can make sense of things that have baffled and frustrated me since I was a kid.

In school, my teachers would say that I made "careless errors". This was so frustrating, because I felt as if I was being accused of not trying, of not caring, and the opposite was true. To this day, I can work very hard on writing something, proofread it a number of times, and it will still contain baffling typos and errors. It's become somewhat of a joke that almost anything I hand out to my students will contain at least one obvious error, unless someone else checks it. Usually I say upfront, "I'm sure there are mistakes, because I'm world's worst proofreader." Does this mean I don't care? Hardly. I hate those mistakes and typos.

When I would clean my room as a child, trying to do my very best with the hopes that my mother would finally, for once, be pleased at the result, she would immediately notice things like a shirt sleeve hanging out of the drawer, some toys in a corner, even a dirty sock in the middle of the floor. I could have sworn that I carefully inspected the room and found nothing amiss. How could I not have noticed these things? My mother would be so frustrated at me. She couldn't believe that I didn't do this sort of thing on purpose, just to annoy her. "Are you blind?" she would ask. "Why do you call me in to inspect your room when it's still a mess?"

I have always wondered why things that seem so easy to other people seemed so hard, almost impossible, to me. Am I stupid? Dense? Weird? People would say, "You must not be paying attention or this would be so easy for you!" but that only made things worse. I thought I was paying attention.

My husband has been forever frustrated and baffled as to why my life seems in a constant state of disorganized chaos, despite my best attempts over the years to correct this. I own numerous books about organizing, both personal and household, and I've tried -- and failed at -- numerous systems over the years. He has seen this as a lack of effort on my part, a lack of follow through. The truth is that I've tried and tried and tried, only to finally give up in despair, hoping that maybe the next book or the next system will work for me.

He has never understood why things will overwhelm me. A typical example: I decide to clean out the closet. He says, "Great idea! And, while we're at it, why don't we clean the entire bedroom and organize all our drawers?" He is an amazing super being and could actually tackle such a project. So he starts pulling everything out and then I'm fighting tears because, to me, he might as well say, "If you tried hard enough, you could organize every house in the neighborhood in one day!" I simply don't know where to start. The closet alone was already too overwhelming.

I feel like going back to every one of my teachers, from elementary school through high school, and saying, "I have ADD. So there. I wasn't bad, lazy, unmotivated, uncaring, or slow."

It makes me want to cry, thinking about it. I was trying. I was trying very hard. And when all those intense efforts never seemed to pay off, when I was accused of being sloppy or difficult or lazy, can anyone blame me for deciding not to push myself so hard? What is the use of trying if it's never good enough?

I think the biggest deal for me is knowing that I'm not stupid. Maybe I'll finally stop berating myself about that.

When I was a kid and my mother would be at wits' end with me, she would go on and on about how stupid I was. But, at report card time, I would get in trouble for my grades. If I was like one of my kids, I would have seen the irony in that and would have said, "Either I'm so terribly stupid, or I'm lazy for not getting straight A's. You can't have it both ways." But, instead, I grew up thinking that I was stupid and lazy.

At the same time, I can understand why I drove my mother to such frustration.

I've taught a number of kids with ADHD. They tend to do well, maybe because I refuse to label them or treat them like their diagnosis. Some of them, along the way, make me want to rip my hair out at times. But I've always had a soft spot for the kid who is bouncing all over while thinking he's standing still, or for the dreamy kid who has to be brought back to earth every few minutes. I wasn't the bouncing off the wall type, but I can relate to thinking you're doing well at something only to get in trouble for failing. One of my students once said, "I focused really well today, didn't I?" and I didn't have the heart to tell him that, to everyone else, it seemed as if he had been inhabiting a different planet during class. Now I know why I relate so well to those kids. I'm one of them.

Maybe best of all, the next time I blast myself with, "What the hell is wrong with you? You are such a complete loser!!" I can remind myself that I now know what's wrong with me, and I'm not a loser.

 

Results from psychological testing

More from September 2012, an email I wrote to my support group:

I'm having another insomnia bout, so I'm not sure if the following will make sense.

My husband and I met with the psychologist on Tuesday so that he could explain the results of the extensive psychological testing I had done. There were no major surprises. I already knew I had PTSD, and I suspected mine was not the mildest case, and he confirmed that. In fact, he strongly suggested I pursue additional treatment, and he gave me the name of a psychiatrist that could determine whether or not I would benefit from other meds. I have an appointment with the psychiatrist on Monday.

The next diagnosis was something I'd suspected for years, but now it's official: I have ADD, the inattentive type. He didn't just base that on screening and personal history; it was very clear from the testing itself. I asked whether or not it could just be another symptom of PTSD and he said, in my case, the difference was obvious. The attention issues with PTSD tend to be as a result of being distracted because of hypervigilance or as a result of dissociation. My test results demonstrated that my main attention problems are significantly different, even though I may also experience PTSD-related attention issues.

There were a few small surprises. I thought I'd done horribly on the test where I had to listen to one-digit numbers being read, add them together, and say the answer. That had been the most stressful part of the test for me. Amazingly, he said I did fine.

Not so with the test where I sat in front of a computer screen and hit the spacebar whenever a letter appeared, unless it was the letter "X". Sometimes the letter would appear in rather quick succession, other times it would be at varying intervals of time. The program measures the types of errors made, how long it takes for the person to respond, etc. The test lasted a horrendously tedious 10 minutes. Apparently a person without any attention or focusing problems will get better as the test goes on. People with different types of ADHD/ADD, or other attention issues, will make distinctively different types of errors. Mine were apparently rather significant, to the extent that the psychologist recommended I consider meds for ADD as well. His only concern, which he knows the psychiatrist will take into consideration, is that stimulants may make my PTSD worse. He emphasized that treatment for PTSD needed to take precedence, because that was my more debilitating issue.

I think it was really good that my husband was there. He described some of the things that have baffled and frustrated him about me, and the psychologist said, "That's classic ADD." What I especially appreciated is that he emphasized to my husband the extreme effort it takes for me to stay focused on most tasks, and he explained why it's pretty much impossible for me to multi-task.

He also went over the results of my personality test and explained to my husband how I am "hardwired" certain ways and that these are unchangeable. Guess I'll never be one of those eternally cheerful, upbeat, life of the party types.

I'm glad I had the testing done. At least now, I can't tell myself that my ADD symptoms are all in my head and that my real problem is that I'm stupid, lazy, or a nutcase. The next time my mother asks, "Are you sure you aren't bipolar?" I can explain that I was extensively tested and no, I'm not. My husband now knows that I don't do certain things in order to annoy him or because I don't care about him. The next time I worry about being crazy, I can remind myself that my test results prove otherwise. So, over all, I think it was money well spent. So does my husband, and he was the one paying for it.

As for the upcoming psychiatrist appointment...I'm a little bit nervous. I'm afraid of going through some awful trial and error in order to find the right meds. I'm scared of certain side effects. I don't want to become a chemical soup. At the same time, if I can be put on something that will alleviate some of my PTSD symptoms, that would be great. And being able to focus better would be...well, I have no idea what it would be like, because I've never experienced it!

In other news, my session with June, the EMDR therapist, also on Tuesday, went well. I brought in a thing I'd written detailing all my PTSD symptoms. I told her that I'd been frustrated by the screening thing she'd used and that I hadn't known how to answer the questions. She appreciated what I wrote, read it over, and asked me questions. For the first time, I felt that she was really listening to me and that she had a desire to get to know me as a person and not just as "EMDR client number whatever". And...she didn't do or say anything annoying the entire time!!!!

Next Tuesday morning I get to see Randy and fill him in on everything that's been going on. It seems like forever since I've seen with him.

For the most part, I feel hopeful that things are getting better. At the same time, I've been plagued by nightmares and sleep problems. Ugh.

 

Why I didn't report

From September 2012:

June, aka "EMDR Therapist", has asked me very little about the rape. One of the few things she did ask was whether I'd reported it. Then she launched into a little speech. It might have been less troubling to me if she had said, "I wish things were different so that more women would feel safe enough to report..." but her speech was more along the lines of, "You should have reported and here's why..."

It really bugged me. She knows nothing of the circumstances of my rape. Yeah, the cop (long story: cops were called after a gun was pulled on one of the rapists) wasn't a lawyer, but he'd already talked to the two guys, knew it was too much of a they said / she said situation, and he was way too familiar with the failings of the legal system in that time and place.

What evidence was there? The bruises and whatever else there might have been could have been easily explained away by "She's kinda kinky and likes rough sex" or "She was abused by one of her boyfriends". Neither of which was true, but how could I prove it?

I wouldn't have received the support I needed during the nightmarish legal ordeal. (I know of no rape survivor who does not describe their experience with the legal system as traumatic, even in the cases where their attacker ended up behind bars.) My family would have been adamantly opposed to my pressing charges. The only friend who might have stood by me - if I had let him - would have been Mark.

At that point in my life, whatever inner strength I may once have had was seriously depleted. I could barely make it through the day. I had nothing left over for pressing charges.

If - big if - it had been taken seriously to the point of going to trial, the older guy would have gained everyone's sympathies as a grieving widower and devoted father. All he needed to do was choke up and brush a tear or two away, and he would have instantly won over every woman there. No one would believe such a sweet, older man was capable of rape. He would have convinced them that all he wanted was to cook me a special dinner, his only motive being kindness and neighborly concern that I wasn't getting enough to eat.

On the other hand, I would have been presented as a wild child, a severely messed up drunken pot-head, eagerly experimenting with drugs and sex, a crazy and out of control little slut who had a constant stream of men in and out of her apartment, who probably had fucked half the men in the apartment building. Naturally, I'd flung myself at the poor lonely man and his nephew and, if they had made any mistake at all, it was giving in to me in a fleeting, regretted moment of alcohol-induced weakness and lapse in judgment. That's if they even admitted that there had been sex; they might just as well have insisted that they rebuffed my drunken advances (I mean, really, look at her...) and that's why I was falsely accusing them...after all, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned...

They could have woven this ridiculously false story convincingly by spinning the truthful testimony of any number of people. Who knows, maybe even my flaky boyfriend at the time would have testified against me: "Well, I have wondered if she ever cheated on me...I didn't know about the night she did cocaine but I saw her when she was still all messed up from the psychedelic mushrooms...yes, I've always thought she liked sex way too much...as far as I know, everything they said about her is true..."

If it had gone to trial, which I doubt it would have, the whole thing would have destroyed me. I'm not being overly dramatic in thinking that I would not have survived. Nothing good would have come of pressing charges. I knew that then and I am even more convinced of it now. It's probably one of the few sensible decisions I made during that time.

People who try to blame me for not stopping a serial rapist and his apprentice nephew are hopelessly naive and misinformed. The only way I could have stopped them from raping other women is if I or someone else would have killed them both. Over the years since then, there have been some dark moments when I've regretted not seeing them dead, but I've never regretted that I didn't press charges. Never.

Way back when, Randy and I talked about why I didn't report, but he certainly didn't second guess me or give me a "why women should report" speech. He completely understood.

Another time, we were talking about a situation where I was tempted to "force" another survivor to do something "for his own good". Randy said gently, "He already had his choices taken away from him. Why would anyone want to do that again? You need to empower him to decide for himself." That was huge to me, and it was something I hadn't thought of.

But I've realized that's one of Randy's guiding principles in therapy, and it's a big reason why he's not the sort who has one method, one approach, one modality of treatment. As he has said to me, "I'm not your typical therapist."

Yeah, I've been angry at him more than once. Furious even. I've been ticked that he wasn't one of these take charge, let's get with the program type of therapists. Now that I'm experiencing the other end of the spectrum, I'm realizing how right his over all approach has been for me. June -- if I'd seen her at the beginning instead of Randy -- would have driven me crazy. I had this intense need to get my story out after bottling it up for so many years. I was desperate and it seemed that the only thing that helped was exposing my secrets one at a time. If Randy had been all "Wait...you don't need to tell it all...why re-traumatize yourself?" I would have been out the door. I couldn't wait. It was like a dam was about to bust. Sticking a finger or cork in its weakest point wasn't going to work.

I think he sized me up from the beginning, perhaps by my huffy, snotty, little brat response when he suggested journaling. (Then I went home and filled page after page like a madwoman.) If he had suggested "finding a safe places" or "the container exercise" to me, I would have bolted. Poor guy, I was so cynical. Every time he acted remotely caring, I would accuse him of just using some fake therapeutic technique...and then there was my tizzy fit over his mere mention of "the empty chair exercise".

He just about fell over in shock when I did the non-dominant handwriting thing. He'd been afraid to suggest it. He wondered why I jumped all over someone else's mention of it while sneering at anything "therapish" he came up with. "That's because that other dude is not my therapist," I said. "So I listen to him."

My husband said to approach EMDR as more of a medical procedure instead of therapy. I just wish the prep work didn't take so much time.

 

If I wasn't crazy before, I am now

Email to my support group in August 2012:

I feel spent.

In the morning, I had my session with New Therapist. It wasn't at all difficult. Mostly she gave an interesting lecture on brain development and then told me what we would actually be doing during EMDR. But I missed Randy, because I would have told him about my past week, which wasn't exactly a walk in the park, and he would have completely understood why.

It seems that New Therapist simply must annoy me at least once every session. I'm trying to remember if Randy annoyed me in the beginning. What I remember is that with him, it was mostly like this:

Me: "Blah, blah blah, but it was really no big deal."

Him: "I think it was. I think it was a very big deal."

Me: "No, it wasn't. And how do you know? You weren't there!"

Him: "If it's no big deal, why can't you look at me? Why are you hiding all curled up in a little ball, with your right leg shaking?"

Me: "Why do you have to make things sound so horrible?!"

Him: "Because they were."

Then I would think that he was hugely annoying...damn him...therapy sucks...

But New Therapist is annoying in a different way. Today it was because I mentioned that I was going in for psychological testing because the marriage counselors recommended it. Specifically, they wanted me to be tested for ADD.

"Why do they think you might have ADD?" she asked, sounding highly skeptical. I cited a litany of reasons. She said it could all be from PTSD.

I replied that I'd had the same issues all through school, that every report card said "not working up to her potential"' "needs to pay better attention", "makes careless errors", and "reads or daydreams when should be working."

She asked when the incest began. I said at age 13. Then she decided, knowing absolutely nothing of my childhood, that I must have had PTSD long before that. "I think we need to take care of the PTSD first before we even look at anything else because I don't think it is anything else."

I figure the psychologist will be able to sort all that out. Isn't that the point of testing? I think what bothered me is that she sounded so sure of herself when she still knows very little about me.

The other thing that annoys me is that she seems to be trying too hard to convince me of how effective EMDR is, and how experienced and well trained she is. I want to say, "Hey, I'm here, aren't I? So enough with the infomercial already!"

After lunch, it was off to the psychologist for testing. I really liked this guy. He apologized up front for being a smart ass, and I said it would make the testing more fun. It did.

But, dang!!! It was exhausting. I felt like every part of my mind and psyche was poked, prodded, and analyzed.

Weird thing I can't figure out: why does taking a screening test for PTSD make me feel so horribly anxious?

But the worst part was this thing that was supposed to test my auditory attention or something like that. A computerish voice would say numbers and I was supposed to keep adding the last two of them and say the answer. That made me nervous and twitchy enough. Oh, no!!! A math test!!!! Yeah, they were only one-digit numbers, but still...Then the voice started reading the numbers faster and faster and I couldn't keep up. It reminded me of 10th grade, when the evil teacher would send me to the board and bombard me with so many questions that, at the end, I couldn't even tell him the answer to 1 plus 1, and the whole class would laugh.

This wasn't quite that bad. I wasn't worried about getting in trouble for getting a bad grade or about being humiliated in front of my peers. But my right leg stiarted twitching and trembling anyway, and my voice started quavering, and I felt on the verge of tears. Then I was afraid I'd fall apart and need therapizing on the spot!! Which, I'm sure, never happens to anyone else.

Finally, after four hours or so, the whole ordeal was over except for filling out and discussing a medical/psychological history. Then, at long last, I dragged myself away, feeling as if my brain had fallen out onto the floor.

Replying to comments from others:

I think the number part of the test was to determine how well I could focus my attention on what I was hearing. There was another test for the visual part. It was simpler, no numbers or adding, but was so boring and tedious I almost went crazy!

Funny thing: I always second guess myself, so now I'm wondering if I tried too hard on the tests. Maybe I should have given in to every distraction that came along, instead of fighting so hard to stay focused. The thing is that I can't maintain that same level of intense effort for very long.

There is overlap between PTSD and ADD. A lot of his screening and history was to determine when the ADD symptoms first became a problem vs. when the PTSD symptoms started. Some of the actual tests should pinpoint that as well. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with.

I know some of my spaciness is dissociation, but certainly not all of it -- and not when I was a little kid.

As for EMDR, if anything, New Therapist is moving too slow for my taste. Yesterday she said that it would take "quite a bit longer than average" to prepare me for EMDR. When I asked why, she said that I had a difficult time "staying in the present". I guess I'm more of a whacked out nutcase than her typical client.

New year...finally a new post

I'm not sure why I let this blog languish...or why I feel like posting again. All I know is that I feel the need to write.

Recovery is a strange, difficult progress. So far, it's been a meandering journey for me, full of stops and starts, detours, roadblocks, mountains, valleys, hidden dangers, beautiful discoveries, etc. Often it takes a crisis to get me willing to get moving in a new direction. A crisis brought me to therapy in the first place and, since then, much of the work I have done has been motivated by pain and desperation.

Months ago, I had another crisis: a panic attack so severe that I ended up in the emergency room, thinking I was dying. I scared the hell out of some of the people who saw me. Physically, I recovered quickly. Emotionally, I felt at the end of my rope.

So I pretty much blamed it all on Randy, my therapist. (Later, I apologized but told him he did make for a handy whipping boy. "Gee, thanks," he replied.) The upshot is that I decided I needed a completely different form of therapy, something more structured, less long term, with a definite and predictable duration -- in other words, EMDR. So I found someone whose website impressed me and who sounded nice on the phone, and off I went (with Randy's blessing).

Long story short, New Therapist and I were not a good fit. No, it was worse than that. To be completely frank, I think she was in way over her head with me...and possibly with any sexual trauma survivor. One example: she showed a shocking disregard for personal boundaries by touching me without permission when I was already triggered...and she acted as if she'd never before seen a PTSD-ish reaction to unwanted touch. Heck, I thought I was low key with my "Don't touch me!" It's not like I screamed or ran out the door or curled into a weepy ball or started having some full-blown flashback -- all things I've done in the past. She also seemed to think nothing wrong of unsolicited touch and acted as if the whole thing was my weird problem and an overreaction on my part. What are they teaching in therapy school? It's pretty bad when the client has a better idea of what is appropriate and what's not, and why.

I put up with things as long as I could, wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt, and not wanting to give up too easily. But eventually, I realized we were heading nowhere, and I was just wasting time and money.

Now I'm back with Randy. It's good.

Some might see my time with Bad Therapist as a senseless detour. But it turns out that I'm glad for the experience, but that's for another post sometime in the future.

In the meantime, over the next few weeks, I hope to be posting about my EMDR experience...that really wasn't.