The PTSD I Couldn’t See, By Amy Oestreicher - Guest Blogger

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The PTSD I Couldn’t See

By Amy Oestreicher

 Guest Blogger

We met Amy online and were inspired by her story of 

courage and resilience. I think our community 

can learn a lot from her about overcoming 

huge obstacles in life.

____________________ 

I grew up thinking an “illness” was either a fever or croup. Illness was a stuffy nose – a sick-day, an excuse to miss a day of school. At 18 years old, “illness” took on an entirely different meaning. Illness meant waking up from a coma, learning that my stomach exploded, I had no digestive system, and I was to be stabilized with IV nutrition until surgeons could figure out how to put me back together again. Illness meant a life forever out of my control and a body I didn’t recognize.

What happened to me physically had no formal diagnosis. I had ostomy bags and gastrointestinal issues, but I didn’t have Crohn’s disease. Doctors were fighting to keep me alive, but I had no terminal illness. There was so much damage done to my esophagus that it had to be surgically diverted, but I was never bulimic. I didn’t fit into any category. Suddenly, I was just “ill”.

I became a surgical guinea pig, subject to medical procedures, tests and interventions, as devoted medical staff put hours into reconstructing and re-reconstructing me, determined to give me a digestive system and a functional life.

I eagerly awaited the day I’d be functional once again – the day I was finally “fixed” and back to normal. Once I was all physically put together, I’d be eating, drinking, walking, and feeling just like myself again.

Right?

Not completely.

I desperately dreamed about the day I’d be discharged from the hospital. I’d be happy, healthy and would finally know who I was again. I’d feel real. I’d feel human. From there, I could do anything.

Reality Sets In

However, after 27 surgeries and six years unable to eat or drink, I learned that the body doesn’t heal overnight. You don’t wake up in the recovery room to a “normal” life.  Stitches had to heal one by one. Neuropathic nerves grew back one millimeter a month. Learning to talk again took weeks. Learning to walk again took months. My skin’s yellowish glare from the IV nutrition I was sustained on took years to fade. Not only was there no “quick fix” to healing, there was no “permanent fix” either. Wounds reopened and I became accustomed to new “openings” in my body leaking at any given moment. I learned that the body is delicate, precious, but incredibly strong.

My body never went back to normal. With no other alternative, I learned how to accommodate and embrace it for its extraordinary resilience.

I was shocked and saddened that I could never get my old, unwounded body back. But what really startled me was realizing what had happened to my mind.

PTSD. I had never heard those letters put together before. I knew what “trauma” was, but I didn’t know it could cause so much internal dis-ease and dis-order – illness that I couldn’t see.

But that was the biggest shock to me – waking up in a new body and a new mind, troubled by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Waking up to Dis-Order

Not only had I woken up in a new body, but I also now had a mind troubled with anxious thoughts, associations and memories. Overwhelmed with confusion, I used the best resource I could think of – a search engine. I didn’t realize I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder until the internet defined it for me. NAMI – the National Alliance for Mental Illness – is an amazing resource with local chapters across the country. Reading about the symptoms of PTSD, I was able to realize that I wasn’t crazy. There were reasons why I was experiencing so many strange sensations – sensations that made me feel alienated from the rest of the world.

Identifying Symptoms

According to NAMI, these are common symptoms that PTSD survivors experienced:

Intrusive Memories

Gaining back my physical health, I was unprepared for flashbacks, images and memories that I thought I had repressed. People always ask me what the very first food I tried was after the doctors gave me the go-ahead to start eating.  After a few months of baby food, I was eager to dig right into my childhood favorites - like fries.  I’ll never forget the first time I had a French fry once I was hooked up anatomically to eat again. I had been unable to eat or drink for years, and now that I was surgically reconstructed, the world was my endless buffet. I expected relief, fullness and normalcy. Instead, I was jolted back to life with every emotion that I had not wanted to feel for all of these years. I learned that the French fry was my “trigger”. Putting food back into my body made me feel. Now that I could “feel”, I was feeling everything – including the pain I had tried to swallow for years of medical uncertainty, surgical interventions, and countless disappointments.

Soon, intrusive memories were unavoidable. I would be sitting in a car, buckled into a seatbelt and all of a sudden I would start to panic. I felt locked in, restricted, confined and unsafe. Suddenly, I was remembering what it felt like to be chained to IV poles, unable to move and constricted to a tiny space. My heart started beating rapidly and I started to panic as my memories intruded on what appeared to be a perfectly calm moment. It wasn’t as if I was recalling a painful time. It was as though the doctors were right there with me, peering over my open wound, dictating my uncertain future, and confining me to a world of medical isolation.

Avoidance

Whenever I started to feel these scary memories at any given time, I felt like I had to avoid any stimulant that might make me feel anything at all. Nothing felt “safe.” I lived my life like I was constantly running or fleeing. I spent years locked in my room, journaling for hours with my blinds shut, careful to shut out any outside stimulation that might make me feel. When I was unable to eat, this was a survival mechanism – if I felt, I might actually feel the deadliest sensation of all – hunger. When I was finally reconstructed, I was so used to avoiding my emotions, that constantly feeling was a tremendous struggle for me.  I had grown accustomed to staying numb.  It was too painful to remember every setback and struggle, too overwhelming to recall everything I had lost with every surgery – my innocence, my old body, my sense of self…

Dissociation

Once I started avoiding my intrusive memories, I got used to the feeling of numbness – so much that I became dissociated. When trauma left me emotionally and physically wounded, I froze to protect myself... I went numb so I didn’t have to feel pain. I went numb so I didn’t have to re-experience what had happened to me and mourn my losses. Becoming numb made my world a blurry haze. The world didn’t feel real anymore as I learned to stay “out of my body.” I would walk around almost like a zombie, compulsively pacing hallways and walking in circles – anything to keep my feet moving rather than my thoughts. Through dissociating, I could avoid really feeling what I need to feel – grief.

Hypervigilance

Staying out of my body and dissociating was how I coped with anxiety. Feeling tormented by my memories, which felt like they were not memories at all, but real and present dangers. I was extremely anxious and irritable. If I couldn’t constantly fidget or find another way to “numb out” I would start to panic, and would be overwhelmed with even more intrusive memories and raw, forgotten emotions. My anger would end up being misdirected at others, when really, I just wanted to shout at my circumstances. My anxiety manifested in all the wrong places – I couldn’t sit still in classes and couldn’t function as a calm, responsible adult.

Soon, these symptoms were controlling my life.

This was a list of instilled, irrational beliefs I created for myself that helped me stay “numb”:

- If I don’t keep moving, I will feel awful emotions.

- I cannot pause to look at anything. If I do, I’ll remember awful things.

- I must keep doing, and I must always know what I am doing.

- I get a nervous feeling inside if I am in a small space.

- When my body feels pain I am in surgery.

- I cannot stop moving. If I do, I drown.

- If I go outside I will feel too much and it will hurt.

Owning My Trauma

My life changed when my stomach exploded, ten full years ago. PTSD is something I still struggle with because my traumas happened to me, have affected me, and will always be a part of me.

But, I’ve learned how to thrive in spite of what has happened to me, and for the first time, my life feels bigger than my past. I’ve found healthier ways to deal with memories, flashbacks and emotions.

Learning to Cope

The PTSD term for finding healthy coping skills is “self-soothing.” To live a healthy thriving life, I’ve had to befriend my past, embrace my experience, and express what had happened to me. I needed to tell my story in order to heal. But first, I had to hear my story for myself, rather than avoid it. Once I learned how to hear my own heart-shattering story, and feel the pain, the frustration, the anger, and ultimately, the gratitude, I was able to speak to it. I was able to gently teach myself how to live in the present moment rather than in the world of the trauma.

Healing didn’t come all at once. Every day I tried to face a memory a bit more. I called it “dipping my toes” in my trauma. Finally, I could put words to my grief. I was able to write, “I am hurting.”

Befriending My Past

As soon as I was able to write words like “sadness” and “pain”, I allowed myself to explore them. Soon, I couldn't stop the words that flowed out of me. My memories started to empower me, and I wrote with feverish purpose.

I started to journal compulsively for hours as every memory appeared in my mind. Soon, the words couldn’t do justice to my traumatic experience – I needed a bigger container. I turned to art, drawing, scribbling. I filled pages with teardrops, lightning bolts and broken hearts. For me, creativity became a lifeline – a release. It was a way to express things that were too overwhelming for words. Expression was my way of self-soothing.

Once expression helped me face my own story, I was able to share it. And the day I first shared my story with someone else, I realized I wasn’t alone. There were others who had been through trauma and other life-shattering events. And there were also people who had been through the twists and turns of everyday life. Being able to share my story emboldened me with a newfound strength and the knowledge that terrible things happen, and if other people can bounce back, then so can I.

Reaching Out

I found wonderful resources. The National Alliance of Mental Illness started as a “small group of families”, and has blossomed into a supportive, educational organization. Active Minds educates and empowers college students through nation-wide chapters, spreading awareness and lending support. The Jed Foundation offers more coping strategies for college students through mental health awareness and suicide prevention programs.

PTSD: The Mosaic I See

My perspective on illness has changed since I was a child, and it’s also changed since my last surgical intervention. I’ve learned that illness isn’t always in the physical scars. I’ve learned that some wounds aren’t visible, and some wounds even we don't know we have, until we choose to take care of them. But I’ve also learned that I’m resilient, strong, broken and put together again, differently, yet even more beautiful than before – like a mosaic.

PTSD has not broken me. It’s taken me apart, and I’m reassembling myself day by day. In the meantime, I’m learning to love what I can build.

Amy Oestreicher is a PTSD peer-to-peer specialist, artist, author, writer for Huffington Post, speaker for TEDx and RAINN, health advocate, survivor, award-winning actress, and playwright, sharing the lessons learned from trauma through her writing, mixed media art, performance and inspirational speaking.  As the creator of  "Gutless & Grateful," her BroadwayWorld-nominated one-woman autobiographical musical, she's toured theatres nationwide, along with a program combining mental health advocacy, sexual assault awareness  and Broadway Theatre for college campuses and international conferences.  She has studied as a playwright and performance artist in the National Musical Theatre Institute at the world-renowned Eugene O'Neill Theater Center.  Her original, full-length drama, Imprints, premiered at the NYC Producer's Club in May 2016, exploring how trauma affects the family as well as the individual.  To celebrate her own “beautiful detour”, Amy created the #LoveMyDetour campaign, to help others cope in the face of unexpected events.  "Detourism" is also the subject of her TEDx and upcoming book, My Beautiful Detour, available December 2017.  As Eastern Regional Recipient of Convatec’s Great Comebacks Award, she's spoken to hundreds of healthcare professionals at national WOCN conferences, and her presentations on diversity, leadership and trauma have been featured at National Mental Health America Conference, New England Educational Opportunity Association's 40 Anniversary Conference, and have been keynotes at the Pacific Rim Conference of Diversity and Disability in Hawaii, the Eating Recovery Foundation First Annual Benefit in Colorado.  She's contributed to over 70 notable online and print publications, and her story has appeared on NBC's TODAY, CBS, Cosmopolitan, among others.    Learn more: amyoes.com. 

Support Group for Formerly Incarcerated Women, by Stephanie Schacher, PsyD - Guest Blogger

Prisonist.org: Faith & Dignity 
for the Days Ahead
Blogs, Guest Blogs & News 

Support Group for 

Formerly Incarcerated Women

by  Stephanie Schacher, PsyD 

- Guest Blogger

Stephanie counsels individuals and groups 

 who have experienced abuse and trauma

in her Branford & Westport, CT offices. 

We recently met with her and invited her to 

write a guest blog for prisonist.org. - Jeff  

_____________

Last weekend I was reading an article in the New York Times called “Cellblock Albany: Still ‘the Senator on the Inside”.  It talked about the number of New York City and State politicians who were convicted in recent years of various white collar crimes, who did or are doing time in Federal prisons. It made me think more about the subject of prison and trauma.

One of the things that stood out for me in this article was the sentiment that imprisonment righted no wrongs that may have been committed. Prison was about punishment, not restitution and rehabilitation. The people interviewed talked about how imprisonment devastates lives and families.  It was a theme I was familiar with, because a few months ago I started a support group for women who have been convicted of white collar crimes and have spent time in prison.  I am a clinical psychologist in private practice, and this was not an area I ever trained in during graduate school.  This was a world that I never knew much about before.

I come from a background of privilege. An intact family with two supportive parents who provided for me emotionally and financially. I lived in a safe and desired community. I had the requisite piano lessons, horseback riding lessons, and summer camps. My parents were involved in my life and my schooling, and they enabled me to complete college and graduate school with minimal debt.  I was set on a path to succeed.

Privilege was not something that I ever thought about but I first became aware of it during graduate school. I was doing therapy with an African-American male with an extensive history of drug addiction and incarceration.  Against all odds and many, many failed rehabs, he had had a few years clean under his belt when I met him. He had probably been incarcerated more than 30 times for various drug-related offenses, and cumulatively had spent the majority of his adult life in jail.

In one particular session after many months of therapy, he began talking about his childhood, and asked questions about mine.  He asked if I’d ever not had enough to eat as a child. He asked if I had lived in a dangerous neighborhood. He talked about how he learned never to back down from a confrontation on the street. The first and only time he did, his mother had beaten him worse than the other kid would have.  He explained that mothers taught their kids this survival strategy – that if you are always willing to fight, others will respect you and leave you alone. I said that there had been no need to learn this survival strategy where I grew up, and that parents taught their kids to walk away from physical conflict.

As he contemplated a childhood where one could safely walk the neighborhoods, one with the privilege of going to sleep well-fed and safe, he asked if I grew up far away from New York City.  I believe he felt that this sort of childhood utopia could have only existed far away from the dangerous cities. When I told him no, that I had in fact grown up less than 30 miles from NYC, he burst into tears. That we could have grown up in communities so close, yet worlds apart, struck him, and me, as profoundly unfair. Our lives had run their courses largely based on the circumstances of our births. I fought to keep myself from crying openly as I contemplated this truth.

Upon becoming a psychologist, I never again looked at another individual or myself without thinking about the question of privilege.  One of my main areas of interest as a psychologist is working with people who have experienced trauma. Childhood abuse and neglect, domestic violence, the trauma of losing one’s mind to mental illness and residing in a locked psychiatric hospital.  Also 9/11, devastating hurricanes, Newtown.  My eyes still well with tears as I think of Newtown.  When one, then two, and finally three clients came to see me individually in my practice who all shared the experience of having been convicted of a crime for which they had been or were to be imprisoned, I began to learn about this particular type of trauma.

I learned about trauma from the inside, by listening to the stories of the traumatized, the stories of people who lost almost all there was to lose.  Trauma is about facing the unimaginable, being powerless and helpless as a force greater than yourself does what it will with you.  The aftereffects are many.  There is loss of a sense of safety that all who walk through the world feeling safe take for granted.  I leave my house every morning because I feel safe.  I do not think that a car will run me over in my driveway, or that a tree will fall on me, or that someone will jump out of the bushes and attack me.  My sense of safety is part of my privilege that I take for granted.  With trauma, there is a loss of agency, a person’s sense that they can have an impact on their world, and control their world to some extent.  There is a loss of a sense of having a future and a loss of feeling that the world has meaning and purpose. It now feels random, uncaring, even malevolent.  Everything you thought you knew about yourself and the world is now wrong.  You can never look at life the same way again.

Healing from trauma means finding a way to reestablish some sense of safety.   Not as safe as you once felt, perhaps, not safety-taken-for-granted, but safety with a careful eye.  It also means finding a way to regain a sense of your own agency, that if you set an intention, you have a good chance of reaching it. As healing continues, the future begins to take a shape, most likely a different one than before, but there is a sense that there can be a worthwhile future.  You then search and struggle to find new purpose to your changed life, and begin to find meaning in your trauma.  The trauma is now not just a horrible reality that comprises all of you, but becomes only part of you.  It becomes an experience that enables you to learn something valuable about yourself, about others, and enables you to feel that you have something valuable to give to others because of it.

While I never worked in a prison, listening to the women in my group talk about their experiences in prison reminded me of working in a psychiatric hospital.  Years ago, I was a staff psychologist at a state psychiatric hospital where the sickest of the sick received their treatment, and often, lived out their lives. Some patients had been there so long that if their charts were stacked end to end they would reach the ceiling. Walking into the hospital each morning, through the security doors, into the lobby filled with patients who had the clearance to leave the grounds for off-site programs, one was immediately hit by the smell of unbrushed teeth and unwashed faces.  Morning breath times 40.   The staff kept a strict division between employee and patient, us and them. The hospital was a strange world where it felt like time stood still and the outside real world didn’t exist.  But over time, the hospital began to feel like the real world, with patients’ struggles to get through each and every day, hanging on to psychic and physical existence and trying to fulfill their most basic needs.  In turn, Manhattan, where I lived at the time, began to feel like an unreal world full of people keeping tabs on trending topics, thinking about their jobs or bonuses, or if they can get a reservation at a popular restaurant …. I am not trying to belittle these pursuits – hey, I was part of that privileged world of those who had their mental health, physical health, jobs, education, and support systems.  But hearing the differences in people’s strivings, and what felt important to them, was so striking that it somehow felt that the world of the day to day struggles of the patients in the hospital was more “real” than my outside world.

Ok, so why am I talking about all of this? Part of a psychologist’s job is to see patterns and symbolic parallels. Something my brain does fairly well by nature.  I see many parallels between the real world/unreal world dichotomy of those in the hospital and those in prison. I see many similar patterns and themes between those who have suffered abuse and those whose lives have been upended by the criminal justice system.  I see a similar division between the have and have-nots, the privileged and those without.

My clients have always been my best teachers, and I have learned the most from them. About mental illness and mental health, about coping and resilience, about suffering and pain. About life.  Through my group I see that people who have gone to prison experience a shift in perception about the “real” world. The old rules from the outside world no longer apply, and if you try to follow what you’ve always known about how people and the world work, you may seriously jeopardize yourself physically and psychologically.  Physical and psychological survival depends on adapting to this “real” world, and making the outside world unreal. Just as abuse causes people to lose their sense of self (or never develop a healthy one if the abuse occurred in childhood), so too do people in prison begin to lose themselves. Loss of safety, loss of agency, loss of meaning, loss of a future, loss of a place in life.  The healing process from this type of trauma is the same. But people are released from jail having to heal, having to piece together their lives and their selves alone, without support. They are repeatedly confronted with the division between “us” and ‘them”. The belief that those of us who have never been incarcerated are nothing like “them”.  I’m sure many of “us” would feel something akin to “they brought it on themselves”. I probably would have thought something along those lines too had I not learned from the stories these women had to tell.  Yes, people do the wrong thing, some do them knowingly, others unknowingly. That’s part of human nature. Part of all of us, perhaps.  

A famous quote from Harry Stack Sullivan, a famous psychiatrist and psychoanalyst: “We are all much more simply human than otherwise”.

 

Stephanie Schacher, PsyD  is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Westport and Branford, CT.  One of her main areas of interest is in the treatment of trauma.  She has worked for a grant funded program through Columbia University treating individuals impacted by 9/11.  She has developed curriculum and providing trainings to educators, nurses, and mental health clinicians in the Gulf Coast following hurricane Katrina in 2005. In her private practice she works individually and in groups with people who have experienced abuse and trauma.  Stephanie can be reached at s.schacher@att.net, 203-292-9845

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We are grateful for all donations this past year to our Ministries. These donations enable us to grow, reach out and serve this community for which there is far too little understanding, compassion, empathy and accurate information.  Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc. is a CT Religious Corp. with 501c3 status -

all donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. We hope you will consider making a donation to our appeal this year.  Donations can be made by credit card/PayPal here, at the "Donate" button on on our site, prisonist.org or by sending your check payable to: "Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc." P.O. Box 1232, Weston, Connecticut 06883.  We have enclosed an addressed envelope for your use. Thank you.

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The darkest days of a person's life can be a

time of renewal and hope

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Progressive Prison Project/  

Innocent Spouse & Children Project

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jgrant@prisonist.org
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