After Wellbutrin, and after my diagnosis, I spent a good amount of time reading about how SSRIs were far from a one-stop fix for PTSD, depression, and anxiety. I have many friends for whom medication has been critical in order to sleep, work, get through the day. And if meds work for you, take them. More power to you! But for millions of people, meds can be unhelpful—or even make their conditions worse. Antidepressants fail to outperform placebos in up to half of clinical trials. Armed with fMRI technology, brain scientists now understand that assuming we are born with chemical imbalances is putting the chicken before the egg—trauma changes the structure and chemical and hormonal responses of our brains. In many cases, we can’t just pump opposing chemicals into our brains with the assumption that things will change. We have to treat the underlying, original cause: the trauma.
So I popped my first Lexapro with great hesitation. And I made a pact with myself that if the medication didn’t work, I would not blame myself, and I wouldn’t jeopardize my health by continuing to take pills I knew weren’t right for my body. At first, the Lexapro didn’t seem to do much at all except make me a bit drowsy. After a few weeks, it became clear that my suffering was somewhat alleviated—but only because I was sleeping so much. I’d sleep ten hours a night and still nod off at my desk twice a day. A couple of months into my very low dose, I was driving our car across town and pulled over at a nice park to enjoy the view for five minutes. I accidentally fell asleep for two hours. That level of constant drowsiness didn’t feel safe. So I went off the drug and tried to manage my sadness with the many tools I’d acquired.
But my tools weren’t as accessible as they had been before. The increased stress from my depression caused my joints to inflame to the point where I couldn’t do yoga—restorative or otherwise. Even meditation was no longer an option. When I lay down to try to do a body scan, I could no longer focus on the air on my palms because the throbbing in other parts of my body was so loud. I tried guided meditations designed for pain, but even these did not help. Focusing on my body, focusing on the way it felt, just brought up waves of dread, betrayal, and anger. Dread at the inflammation coursing through my body, bringing fears of my imminent death, of becoming another ACE statistic. Betrayal at a body that had never felt quite mine and that I now wanted to dissociate from more than ever before. And anger—because it was as if my mother’s hand was reaching forward, defying the laws of space-time, to hurt me again. The pain from being slapped to the floor or lashed with hangers—it was not gone. It had been stored deep inside my joints and womb. I was still being punished.
Without my tools, and exacerbated by my hormone medication, my C-PTSD symptoms returned, stronger than ever.
I tried my best. I really did. I did not slip back into the quicksand of C-PTSD’s grasp without a fight. I read Anne Lamott’s books and Suzan Colón’s Yoga Mind and listened every day to podcasts put out by Esalen and local Zen centers. I tried to understand that even though my world was narrowing to the very essentials of being alive, the essentials were still an abundance. I tried to bask in that abundance. I tried to eat my oatmeal with seaweed in it mindfully. I read the writings of American Buddhist nun Pema Ch?dr?n, which suggested I ask, “As a result of my pain, [do] I know more about what it is to be human?” I read How to Do Nothing, a book by Jenny Odell about the value of stillness, and tried to understand that my can’ts were okay—were, if anything, a fiery rebellion against a capitalist culture of overwork. I spent a lot of time sitting outside and staring at birds.
And I continued with therapy. Well, for a while. I’d been seeing Mr. Sweater-Vest at the trauma school for a few months now—the guy who had me draw pictures of my personalities. He had promised at the beginning of our time that within six months I’d feel significantly better, but we were most of the way through that time frame and I felt worse than ever. So one day, I walked into his office and started yelling about how furious I was that I had no control of my body.
“Yes. That sounds hard. I hear you saying that you tried your best to take care of yourself, but this situation is unfair and you feel hopeless,” he said in his careful, therapist-y way. It drove me fucking crazy. “Do you want to do some EMDR? Shall we try a calming technique?”
“What exactly are we doing here?” I snapped at him. “I’ve asked this of you many times, but I actually need an answer today. What is my treatment plan? What the fuck am I supposed to be EMDRing? Or IFSing? Or CBTing? Do you not have anything else to give me to deal with this? Like, what stage are we in? What comes next? When is this supposed to work? What’s my homework? What’s the plan?”
“Let’s talk about why you feel you need a plan,” he said. “I feel like you’re not trusting the process.”
“I could trust the process more if I understood more about what the process is.”
“I think this could have roots in your trust issues and your trust of me. Shall we talk about how this might be your obsessive need to control things coming to the surface?”
I am lucky that I was able to maintain one trauma tool. In retrospect, it might’ve been the most important one: the ability to say “This is not what I need. Bye.”
I’ve had doctors tell me I was crazy, that my symptoms were psychosomatic when I got rashes from the pill and depression from Mirena. I’ve had doctors tell me that my copper IUD couldn’t be affecting my mood or my endometriosis or my hormones because it had no hormonal side effects. I’ve had doctors charge me hundreds of dollars to give me incorrect diagnoses or gaslight me into thinking that I didn’t know my own body.
But this time I would not be denied my reality by doctors. I was fed up with it.
I stopped seeing my therapist after that session. Wanting information and structure on the nature of my therapy should not have been pathologized. It was a reasonable need that should have been respected.
And I stopped seeing the gynecologist who snapped, “Tell your psychiatrist about your mental health stuff. Don’t tell me.”
No. I will be heard.
I switched to a new gynecologist who specializes in pelvic pain disorders. Her intake forms took longer than other doctors’ because there was an entire section for trauma and whether I was abused. When she sat me down for a consultation, one of her first questions was “What was the nature of the abuse?”
When I looked startled, she said, “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
But I just grinned. “No, no, no! I want to! I’m happy to! I’m just surprised!”
Dr. Emily Blanton wasn’t rushed. She took her time with me—a full hour of careful, deliberate examination and explanation. As she snapped off her gloves, she said, “My theory is that you’ve spent the last two decades with chronic inflammation as a result of endometriosis. You probably have muscle damage in your pelvic area from it being stressed and inflamed for years, and you’re just finally seeing the consequences now. It’s like you’ve been walking around with a charley horse, constantly, for years.”