I have previously talked about how I got PTSD and I have maybe touched a little bit on how I got it under control and managed to carry on with my life, but that's a subject that I want to go into further depth with. I want to make clear that although I have a degree in Social Sciences which includes both Sociology and Psychology I am not a therapist what I am giving here is the personal story and the opinion of someone who although not a lay person is also in no way a qualified councillor. My recovery started with a breakdown which probably sounds strange but I guess a lot of the time you don't get help until you reach the end of your teether.
For those who haven't seen my previous video or read about my experience before I will give a very brief version, essentially I was beaten around the head with iron bars and then held hostage during a robbery at the place I used to work. After this experience I was only off long enough for my physical wounds to heal and I returned to work quiet quickly, the breakdown did not come until around 8 years later. The breakdown was not totally down to the PTSD I was suffering, I was experiencing both visual and audio flashback, I would sometimes see scenes from the robbery playing out in my head like a bad video I just couldn't stop playing, sometimes I would simply hear the sounds of the iron bars hitting my head and at other times I would have the most realistic nightmares, nightmares which at the time would feel so real it was truly like I was relieving the event. This was something I was managing though, I was pushing through and continuing to work and continuing to look after my young daughter. I was progressing at work, managing to climb up the ranks even though sometimes when my stress would get too much I would purposely fail exams in order to slow down my progress as I didn't feel capable of taking on more responsibilities. I had a very unsupportive partner who was doing very little towards raising our daughter leaving the majority of it up to me with help from my parents. I didn't have my breakdown until I was the deputy manager at my place of work, my manager kept taking a lot of time off and leaving everything up to me, and two people below me started a sort of work based war, they hated each other and they were at each others throats and I was having to deal with this. Add on to this the fact that at this period in time I kept having to throw violent drunks out of the business, usually after they had attacked me and the pressure just mounted and mounted.
The final straw which broke the camels back was that we got a new area manager and my boss kind of went crying to him claiming no one underneath her was carrying there weight. The robbery incident had happened on a Sunday night after the business had closed and when I had become a manager I had basically negotiated with the area manager at the time that I would work any shift at all except a Sunday night as the times I had worked a Sunday night after the incident had led to me having extreme anxiety and panic attacks. My boss got the new area manager to tell me that he didn't care about my issues or problems if I wanted to continue working in the business I would have to work whatever I had to work and that was it. When the new rota's were put up there I was put down to work long shifts on Sundays closing the pub and this was what plunged me into a very dark place. I carried on going to work but as my first Sunday in a long time approached I simply found myself loosing it. I made a Doctors appointment one for which I had to get cover and go to during the middle of a shift, and with the way this appointment went I ended up being signed off and going home instead of returning.
In the Doctors office I explained everything I could to the best of my ability, I cant remember everything that I said but I remember one thing and that was I said something on the lines of ''I just cant do it, I cant work till close on a Sunday, If I have to do that then I am just going to throw myself down the stairs leg first, so that I can break my leg and not have to go to work'' It was this comment that got me the help I needed, the Doctor contacted what is called Crisis Team they are a group of mental health professionals who will visit people in there homes to assess them and to try to get them the help that they need. I remember the first thing they asked me after introducing themselves was why had I told a Doctor that I was going to try to kill myself, I explained that I hadn't said that and that what I had said was that I was essentially contemplating trying to break my leg so that I didn't have to go to work, I had no desire at any time to kill myself, I love my daughter far to much for that, and I love my folks far to much and I had things I enjoyed and looked forward to, I just couldn't deal with the idea of working those Sunday nights because something inside me told me that If I worked a Sunday there was a strong possibility that a robbery would happen again and that I would have to live through that experience again or that I might even end up being violently killed. I knew statistically that the chance of a robbery happening was no different on a Sunday than any other day of the week in the rational part of my mind but there was this irrational part which felt certain that working a Sunday would lead to horrible consequences.
This led to me getting sent to a few therapists, in the first couple of cases I would have one very short appointment where the therapist would learn that my issues were related to trauma they would then inform me that although they were a therapist they were not a trauma therapist and therefore did not feel that they were qualified to help me and that I would need to see a trauma therapist. Eventually I began to see a woman who was a Trauma Therapist, my Dad was amazing he would drive me to the appointments and he would help try and keep my spirits as high as possible. During my fight to get better there was another fight going on one that my Dad was also deeply involved in. I was handing in sick notes but my work kept contacting me, they wanted to be kept up to date on my mental health progress, they also did all kinds of things to try and squeeze me to either return or to quit, they messed around with my pay, one month I literally got about £10 for the month as they told me on my payday that I had run out of sick pay allowance, they also tried to deny that the robbery ever happened, I had to contact the police and get the crime report to prove that it actually happened and that I was present. It was awful and there meddling actually was affecting my healing... Eventually they fired me for being off sick for too long, I didn't complain though as they paid me holiday pay and a final pay check at the end and I had already enrolled myself on to a course which came with its bursary and would help me train for a new type of employment.
My therapy lasted around a year. As well as just talking about stuff the therapist used what is called Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) which is a type of psychotherapy particularly used for treating post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD. so what is EMDR well its a technic which uses a patient's own rapid rhythmic eye movements to try to dampen the power of emotionally charged memories of past traumatic events. Basically the therapist will move their fingers back and forth in front of your face and ask you to follow there fingers with your eyes while they have you recall the disturbing event which caused you to have PTSD. This will include not only what happened but the thought that were going through your head at the time as well as the emotions and sounds and sensations that you heard and felt.
Gradually, the therapist will guide you to shift your thoughts to more pleasant ones. In my case this involved you having to tell the story to the best of your ability remembering as much of it as possible in as deep as detail as possible finishing off by moving yourself to some kind of mental happy place. Your happy place is something that you pick for yourself, you can basically pick any place and then you will fill out the details of this place and talk about it to kind of ground yourself back down to earth and let the negative feelings go away. My happy place was in my childhood bedroom playing Super Mario World on my Super Nintendo knowing that my family were around me and I was safe.
I find it hard to know how much the therapy helped me, I do know that it got a lot of details I had forgotten about the robbery to come out of me, I remembered things I had forgotten and I am told that remembering everything as painful as it is is all part of helping your mind file it away and put it to bed. You never forget what happened but as time goes on you kind of find yourself more able to talk about your experience without falling apart. I think one of the things that helped me the most in the end was getting fired by work, knowing that I wouldn't have to return to that environment again, that I wouldn't have to deal with the people again who had been so unsupportive who in my opinion had known they were breaking me was just such a big relief it felt like I was getting a large part of my life back. All of this was only the start though and it took me years and years to rebuild myself. I am happy now, I am a survivor but I also know that I am a very very different person to the one who was held hostage that night, whether that's for the better or the worse would probably depend upon who you ask.
