Normally, if you’re facing a threat, your body immediately reacts to it. Your heart starts pumping blood. The hair on the back of your neck stands up. This is all in service of getting blood to your legs so you can run the hell away from it. On top of this, you feel your heart beating faster. You recognize that you’re freaking out. That makes you even more anxious, and your heart beats even faster. But Siegle told me, “As far as we can tell with complex PTSD, in really stressful situations, you’ve got this coping skill that allows the prefrontal cortex to just shut off some of our evolutionary freak-out mechanisms and instead have high levels of prefrontal activity. So our bodies stop reacting.”
In other words, in some moments of intense stress, we are super-duper good at dissociation. Our hearts don’t pump as hard. Our brains cut themselves off from our bodies, so we don’t really have that feedback loop of getting anxious about getting anxious. Instead, our prefrontal cortices blink online—we become hyperrational. Super focused. Calm. Siegle explained it this way: “If running away has never been an option for you, you have to be cunning and do other things. So it’s like, this is time to bring all of our resources online, because we’re going to survive this.”
People with C-PTSD might have an outsized, gnarly freak-out about a cockroach in the house or a flash of anger on someone’s face. But in times of real danger—when someone furious is coming toward us with an actual machete in their hand, ready to kill—we face the problem head-on, while everyone else is cowering. A lot of the time, we’re the ones getting shit done.
When I was in college working for the school paper, there was one month when we didn’t sell enough ads to cover the cost of printing. The head of student media called the editor in chief, the ad sales guy, and me into our office and just absolutely lost her shit at us. She was screaming, saying that we were incompetent and irresponsible, that we could never have a career doing this kind of work. The ad sales guy completely shut down. The editor in chief sobbed. But I spoke calmly and plainly. I told her that her anger wasn’t beneficial. I told her that we were students, and this was the appropriate time in our careers to make these kinds of mistakes. I told her that we were sorry but that we needed her support in order to fix the problem. Before I knew it, the head of student media was apologizing to us and admitting she was the one who was out of line. Afterward, my editor, still wiping her red eyes, marveled at me. “How did you do that? You, of all people?” she asked. At the time, it didn’t make sense to any of us. Now it does.
It makes sense why I lose my shit at Joey over him dropping a pot in the sink, but if he’s in a screaming brawl with his family, sometimes I can mediate the conversation.
It makes sense why now that the world was falling apart, I was calmly gluing the pieces back together.
When it came time for Siegle to name this phenomenon—the dissociated state that means you don’t always have emotions that are totally appropriate for a situation—he called it Blunted and Discordant Affect Sensitivity Syndrome. The acronym for this? BADASS.
“The vision was always, you know, the little girl comes into the clinic after being abused and totally has no self-esteem. And the clinician just says, ‘Well, maybe you’re just a little bit BADASS.’ That’s where I want to go with that.”
“Damn,” I said. “It would have been helpful if I’d talked to you after I first got diagnosed. Oh well.” Then I laughed, my BADASS-ness casually inserting itself into the conversation.
* * *
—
As the fog of pathology burned off and my understanding of my superpower blossomed, I started to see that my C-PTSD did come with a fair amount of badass benefits.
Over the summer of 2020, Lacey started dating an extremely hot dude. Unfortunately, like most extremely hot dudes, he also insisted on being extremely unavailable. He frequently canceled plans without rescheduling new times to see her and didn’t call when he promised to. He blamed it on his busy schedule, but his flakiness was driving her increasingly up the wall.
“Is this normal?” she texted me every few days. “I don’t want to seem needy or weird. But I can’t sleep. I feel all this anxiety and rage. It’s all I think about.”
“Totally normal! Of course you feel that way. Most people would feel bad about this. But your C-PTSD means that you especially value stability and reliability!” I replied. “It’s okay to have these needs. They’re not out of control. They are a part of you, and it’s okay for you to make them known. If he can adapt to meet your needs, then he’s a decent dude! If it freaks him out, good riddance to him.”
It turned out that he was indeed a Grade A prime-cut fuckboy. But by the time the weather chilled, Lacey was Tindering with other men who made her feel safer. That’s when she reached out to me with one of her characteristic voice messages—passionate, sincere missives that she sent when she was too busy or overwhelmed to text.
“You know when I was anxious about that dude?” she said, her voice brisk and breathless as she walked along a beach somewhere, ocean air scraping against her microphone. “I tried reaching out to all my ‘normal,’ non-C-PTSD friends, and all of them kept asking, ‘Why are you obsessing over this guy?’ But you immediately saw that my feelings were not really about this dude. You pushed me to be authentic in my interactions with him. You had a level of insight that I’ve never gotten from anyone, even other therapists! And you never made me feel ashamed. It was such a relief and is still such a relief. I’m actually able to date now and have fun! You’re my knight in shining armor, Foo!”
How about that. My struggles with C-PTSD made me more empathetic. They made me more attuned to what people needed and uniquely skilled in comforting them.
Even the negative parts of my C-PTSD had a silver lining. It was true that when Joey was angry or upset, I had a hard time sitting with his pain and never let him sulk in peace. Instead, I’d nag and badger him until he told me exactly what was up. Once, fed up with me pawing at him like a squirrel analyzing a nut, he yelled, “Can’t you just say, ‘I hear you, that sucks’ instead of trying to solve all of my problems? Not everything needs solving!”
But days afterward, once he was feeling better, Joey often thanked me. “In the end, because you pester me, I tell you things I don’t tell anyone else. And then the talks we have about my feelings change me for the better,” he told me. “Nobody makes me feel cared for as much as you do.”
I wasn’t loved in spite of my C-PTSD—but, in part, because of it.
* * *
—
I wasn’t the only one who came into her powers during the global pandemic.