The mind is the most complex organ in the body, and even scientists that have studied it all their lives do not know completely what it is capable of. Hundreds of years and all kinds of theories have been applied to how it may or may not function. Assumptions have been made that because of _____, then _____ must be the result. My stand is that I have no stand. Nature vs. Nurture—I truly believe it’s a complexity of both. If there is anything I know about people, it is that we are all different. There are general types and similar attributes, but even identical twins can experience the same event and produce two very separate experiences and reactions. It was Chicken Soup for the Soul that said, “Others are like you, but they are not you.” It is a good way of looking at people as a whole.

     This book primarily deals with PTSD, flashbacks, hidden memories, and trauma. These are things specific to each individual and cannot be lumped together. One child can be beaten and never have an issue while another child has their cell phone taken away for 10 minutes and feels traumatized for life. Discounting the action or reaction does not help. If something feels like they experienced a trauma, then to them it is a trauma.

     Reading this book, you will see that I could be classified as having a pretty horrible life. Only, I did not see it as horrible until the trauma stopped. Most of the bad stuff happened by my early 30s, but it wasn’t until I was almost 40, that I truly had a problem. You can read the chapters in the pages that follow, but the point I want to make here is how things started:

     I was driving to college on a day, I classified as normal. Flashes started popping in my head. They were fast and non-descriptive. I was overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, and panic. I pulled over. I called my mom, only I do not remember the call, just that I had called her. I must have calmed down because next I remember being in class, and my life picked back up. Over the course of the next few weeks, my nightmares (I have always had them) became worse. The flashes likewise would pop in and out, but they were easy to dismiss originally. Over the next few months, these “flashes,” became more and more intrusive and disturbing. I started to worry. I had taken an abnormal phycology class in school and really liked the instructor. He was very honest, and when someone asked him a question, he did not know the answer to, he would say he did not know the answer. He had earned my trust. I also knew he was still in private practice as well as a professor. I made contact.

     My class was over, and my grade had already been posted, so he did not feel that seeing me was a conflict of interest, and I agreed. In our first meeting, I told him about my ex-husband and the wrongful incarceration (prison), but at this point in life, I thought I had those issues delt with. He was experienced enough to know that I might need a bit more attention than most and started scheduling me for the end of his day. That way, he would not have to stop me if I started opening up. I was also a broke college student, so he gave me a sliding scale with no pressure on paying. I was truly blessed.

     At this point in life, I would say I had a pretty good relationship with my family and friends. I was dating a really nice guy who had a great kid. I was working at a job I loved, going to school, and volunteering. I was happy.  The problem was these flashes (and my dreams). I could not figure out what was going on in my head. As you can imagine, things got worse. There was no rhyme or reason to the visions, and I truly did not know where they were coming from. As I continued counseling, my mom came down to visit and attend therapy with me (a safe place to talk). With the counselor’s guidance, we walked through some of these things that were popping in my head. I would describe events or scenes, and my mom would say “Sweety, that really happened.” She could give more detail and back stories as to when and how. It seemed she went with me a few times, and I described horrible stuff. She would say, “That was real; that’s a memory.” I screamed at her: “How is this possible?” “How could you let those things happen?” “Where were you?” Mostly though, I questioned “WHY NOW?” Why after all these years, after I have worked so had to pull out of the gutter, why would this shit start popping in my head now? 

     My therapist explained what was happening as: “Because it can.” He said that most of my life, I had been fighting to survive. He used a bunch of scientific words and even gave me references to look at, but when your mind needs to engage in what is happening now, it cannot look at what happened then. I am a smart ass, so my thought was “Why can’t this shit just stay buried?” I do not need it. He laughed but said, there is a really good chance that I am still allowing my subconscious to control some of my actions and reactions, and my mind would like that sorted out. This was not the answer I wanted, but it made sense.

     The mind works as a large library. Aside from controlling bodily functions and keeping things working without us realizing it, it separates sensations, background life, experiences, and memories of those experiences, and it does that without us really realizing it. An example I really like is putting on your socks. In the morning, it is a conscious thought that your body partakes of and you are aware that you are doing it at the time. You can feel the sock in your hand, you feel it cross your toes and up onto your ankle and then potentially your calf. You let go and wala—just as fast as it happens, the memory goes away. Within just a few minutes, you do not really think about how your sock feels on your skin unless you put your attention there, or it moves and the body notices. Trauma likewise can get filed the same way. It happened—next. When you are like me, and there are repetitive traumas, your mind goes to the next thing without a glitch. This is like putting your pants or shoes on after your socks. There is a point even the abnormal becomes normal.

     It is definitely not exclusive, but childhood trauma can fuck a person up for life! The problem with these experiences is that at this stage of development, the brain is not fully developed. Living a trauma, especially if it was caused by a caretaker, can cause what’s been described as the fracturing of the mind. That is the best description. Over the last several years of my life, it felt as though I had two separate brains functioning (both together sometimes), but more frequently, separate. I checked myself in someplace several years ago and described my problem as a kind of seizure—like I was fine, there would be a glitch, and then I was not fine. This was not a matter of multiple personalities, although that is a strong example of a fractured mind. When part of you just cannot handle something, it sends it to a different section of your mental library.

     For me, this appeared in my dreams/nightmares as far back as I can remember, but in the morning, for a while, I could tell it to go away. The day finally came that the trauma section of my brain decided to open up for business, and it was going to do it with or without my permission. A huge problem I faced was blackouts. When I would trigger, and my subconscious took over, it would take whatever time I spent triggered back into the vault with it. Originally, I did not drink or do anything that would affect memory loss, and I did not notice it happening until it was pointed out to me. The first one that was brought to my attention was probably about 6 months after the flashes started. I had a roommate at the time. I went to bed, and when I got up, my roommate asked where I had been. In bed? She said I was gone for two days. She said the day before when she got up, the front door was open, and I was gone. She looked everywhere for me and called, but I left my phone in my room. Until I saw the calendar, I thought she was crazy. The blackouts unfortunately continued. I generally, especially in my journal, refer to them as “losing time.” Eventually, I started drinking.

     The next 20 years were both incredible and HORRIBLE! I would get things going, and life would be wonderful…CRASH! I am right on track for a fantastic life… CRASH! I am happy, content, and loving life … CRASH! I find it amazing what I can justify or make excuses for, but again, you do not know what you do not know. I got on a tangent of self-help books, specifically self-sabotage. I went on a health kick; it must be my diet. If I just ate healthier, I would get better. I went through therapy, medications, and definitely sleep aids! I checked myself into places for help: therapy, addiction, anything. Worse yet, I had stopped sleeping; I would go months with only a few minutes at a time.

     Maybe not to others, but to me, that’s when I went the craziest. Traditional counseling says to stop the flashbacks, control them, block them out. This forces the brain to move them to the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—talk about scary! That shit is hard enough to deal with while you are awake; now my brain started working on things when I had no controls. My body started waking me up every time I hit REM. No matter how hard I tried, I could not sleep through the night. I became extremely suicidal and yet kept trying all the new medications recommended. I would try anything to Make It Stop. Anything to sleep through the night. (I have added a couple of links at the end of the chapter on why REM is important.)

     Movies come to mind and famous quotes. We have all heard it over and over: You cannot run from your problems; you have to face them. Fantastic advice. Yah—with PTSD, this becomes an enormous problem. There are many reasons. I would say that the biggest problems are society, stigmatisms, and ego, and there is that little problem of the memories/problems going away. It is like they are locked up in vault, and you cannot access them by choice.

     Episodes, triggers, crashes, flash backs—whatever you want to call them—are not always scheduled. They are also not active memories (until they are). If you have ever had the pleasure of talking to a veteran with PTSD, they will be telling a story, and then their countenance changes; they usually get quiet for a moment, and then there is usually a lot blinking. Then they go back and continue the story, but you realize that they were someplace else. They left a lot of the story out. Fortunately, I have never had to experience war. I cannot imagine how bad it is for these individuals. I have, however, seen multiple vets during their flashbacks. I know they can be very dangerous. Sleepwalking is the best way to describe it. They may be there and trying to interact with you, but in reality, they are not fully there. For several years, I had a lover that suffered from this. There would be nights that I would wake up to him strangling me. I am good with people in trauma, so I could usually wake him appropriately. When he would wake, apologize and be mad at himself. I knew it was not intentional towards me. Those nights were also accompanied with extreme sweating, mumbling, even yelling, and I was never the intended target, so I knew it was not personal.

     Flashbacks for me were the same. I could not recall these memories on my own. I definitely could not tell you why I would trigger. Here is a random story from my life. I do not like crab. Someone asked if I had a bad experience with crab. I answered no, and then I went on a tangent. One of my dad’s many failed businesses was a fruit stand. It was located next to a beach. He had hooked up with some crabbers and thought he should sell crab too. I was maybe 10 or 11, but my brother and I got assigned cleaning the crabs. If you have ever cleaned a crab, it is disgusting! Slimy, yucky, gross, and the smell is awful. Imagine being a young kid close to the beach, and your days were spent cleaning crabs instead of building sandcastles. I was 48 before I realized why I do not like crab. That was not a hidden memory, but for years I would gag at the thought of eating crab and had never made the association. Flashbacks are like that, only the story behind the association is locked up. You have seen in movies, I am sure, that somebody is in shock—they cannot talk right now. Then eventually the scene clips to a time after the person has been under phycological care then they were able to talk and explain the situation. This usually happens in an hour episode, so the public view is that a person should be able to recover in a short amount of time. However, what if the actual amount of time is not in the script, but actually someone’s life?

The problem compounds:

     When there is a perpetrator of the trauma, and they know they are doing something bad to someone else, they usually warn the victim to keep it a secret. Usually, but not always, threats are added that if they do tell, bad things will happen to them or the people they love. Before the brain is fully developed, and if it can hide these bad things from itself, it often does. This is a fracturing of the mind and a way for someone to protect themselves from “bad things.” I am not opposing faith, and I recognize that much good comes from religious teachings, but some religious teachings can be a huge contributor to this problem. “You shouldn’t think such things.” “Even a bad thought is a sin.” “It doesn’t matter what they did, you need to forgive.” I am sure you can add more sayings you have heard, even if just in the movies. The victim of the “bad thing” becomes as much at fault as the perpetrator. This will almost force traumas into the subconscious, especially for children. I think for myself and possibly others with a bad childhood that the brain starts training itself to hide things. The problem is that they are still there, only there is no real memory path to get to them. This is like being lost while driving—you know what town, state, and country you are in, and you know where you think you made the wrong turn, but you do not know exactly how to get back to that point. When we are lost now, and if we can Google, we do. If we cannot Google, we try and retrace our steps. We try to point ourselves in the right direction, but when everything seems familiar, it’s easy to get more lost.

     This book is hopefully a way to help retrace steps. I am writing it with the intent of creating triggers. That seems cruel to say, but I am hoping to help you retrace your steps by back tracking. I was very fortunate to finally use Ayahuasca. (There is an entire chapter on this treatment.) Aya does not erase the trauma! I have this is my warnings, and it can affect different people differently. What it did for me was bring out the memories that had been haunting my sleep. On many occasions I wish I had just left those memories buried. It helped me create the trails to memories, but that also meant I had more work to do. I am aware that it will be a lifelong journey to recover, and I may never recover completely (I may always hate crab). Part of the recovery will be to accept the things that are not likely to change. Why should I write a book if there is Ayahuasca? The simple answer is that Aya is expensive, illegal, it can fuck you up worse, or it can kill you. If it gets under government control, it can be used in non-beneficial ways. Also, it is a tool, not a remedy. Different people need different types of tools to accomplish their goals. This book is just another tool you can use for recovery.

National Sleep Foundation

https://www.thensf.org/what-is-rem-sleep/

Technical description of Rapid Eye Movement sleep

ASA American sleep Association

https://www.sleepassociation.org/about-sleep/stages-of-sleep/rem-sleep/