Tag: therapists

The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Narratives, Trauma, and My Childhood Dog

My wife told me that her version of the story starts here:

We’re sitting in the car, driving to my dad’s house. We’re passing the Walmart and the AC is fighting the Vegas heat, the stifling air quality two days after the Fourth of July. She takes my hand. “I’m sure it’s fine,” she says, then grimaces. This is a validating aha moment for me at the time—she has doubts. Later, she says she regretted the words the moment they were out of her mouth. But what if it’s not fine?

But for me, the story doesn’t start in the car.

As a writer, I like to start in the height of the action—I would open this story with me standing over the body.

But that’s not where my real version of the story starts. The one I tell myself on long walks and long nights like a lullaby.

No; the story starts with Ziva.

…

Ziva came to me as an awkward looking Dutch Shepherd puppy as I was finishing the fifth grade and embarking on the terrifying journey that is middle school.

She stayed with me through panic attacks and psychosis, self harm and delusion, lost chances and bad breakups, my parents’ divorce and leaving school several times over.

When I’d attempted suicide at seventeen, my best friend’s mom, a psychiatrist, told me I had to hang in there because Ziva would never understand why I left her.

So I hung in there.

Ziva, however, passed in the spring of 2019. I had a lot more, or understood I had a lot more, to hang in there for by then, and hadn’t felt like I’d been just hanging in there for years; no cutting, no attempts. I was in the relationship of my dreams and surrounded by people who loved me.

But one morning, a few months later, Ziva came back to me in a dream.

In the dream, I was in my childhood home. My dad’s house, at the time, in reality. Ziva entered through a burst of white light.

I understood in the dream that she was dead, but in the grips of sleep, believed that she had come back to visit me. She wagged her tail and spun around. I gave her lots of scritches and told her all of the things I could want to say.

But Ziva kept looking back at the white light she’d come from, antsy. Like she was trying to tell me something. Maybe that she had to go again. I let her run back into the light. I woke up.

That morning, it became clear no one had heard from my dad in some time.

That morning, we were in the car. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

That morning, I stood over the body, and wondered if something in me had already known.

…

I tell myself the story a lot.

Ziva. The messages with my mom. Why were heat sensitive packages piling up propped against Dad’s unopened front door for days? Why had he not put the trash bins down at the curb on trash day? Sitting in the car. Knocking. Using my spare key to open the door. Thinking that I am the only one with a spare key. Mom, now his next door neighbor, was thinking of checking on him when she got back from an errand. I have the key that was hers. Yelling for Dad in a house where I am the only thing living. “Hey, Dad! Anyone home? Daddy!” Walking back out, down the stairs, swearing I will not hand the key to anyone else who’s not a professional.

“It’s not fine,” I tell my then-girlfriend, now-wife through the passenger window of her car. She’s confused, not having gathered from my demeanor that it’s not fine, though I’m not making much sense verbally. “There’s this thing in my dad’s bed. It’s not my dad. But… I think it used to be.”

I had left the door open behind me, the key more about blessing than physical entry. The smell wafts out of the house. She gets it.

Calling my mom. How do I tell her? She is out at lunch with Grandma, on break from considering puppies at an adoption fair. Calling 911. “No rush, I guess.” Enough firefighters for a calendar, who just keep offering me water while I try not to puke on the lawn. Police, and a report hand written at my mom’s kitchen table. What can I say?

I call my best friend in the bathroom. “My dad’s, kinda… dead. I think he’s… been dead, for a while now.”

Grandma tells me, “Oh, Hannah, I just knew something wasn’t right. I just knew it wasn’t right when he didn’t put the trash bins out that week…”

The coroner. “You look really young,” she tells me over and over.

“Twenty-one,” I say, unable to think of anything else.

And a counselor who is so high empathy I think she might now be having a worse day than I am.

“First we have to identify him,” the coroner is explaining to my mom, as we fill in details.

“You can’t just…?”

“It’s not… really… a visual thing.“

“Well, what about fingerprints?” My mom loves crime shows. She knows how they ID a body at various stages.

“This isn’t really…” The coroner is trying to be gentle here. She looks at me, the known witness. “This isn’t really a ‘fingerprints’ kind of situation. Do you maybe know who his dentist was? For the records?“

My mom has a white knuckled grip on my hand. The volunteer counselor looks like she might cry.

After the coroner leaves, my mom examines a picture she took of my dad in his youth, in a collage frame in her room. He is victorious, standing on a rock at the end of a long hike, arms thrown to the sky. Yosemite at sunset is the backdrop, their favorite beautiful place, the place they met, lived, worked, and fell in love.

“Cheers,” my mom says to the sky, to the picture of Dad, holding up her gluten free beer. Some of Ziva’s toys still line her floor.

…

I think parts of the story have been compromised by time—my private game of telephone. Other parts, by flashbacks, by nightmares, by hallucinations—all blurring the narrative.

Sometimes I try to change it. I don’t start with Ziva. I go back to the day my father almost certainly actually died. Ten days earlier. We’re sitting on his couch. I’m in the neighborhood to bring in Mom’s mail and check on a few plants while she’s on a trip with Grandma, pick up a few items I left when I moved out.

I visit with Dad. We sit on his couch. He says he has a headache. We talk about anything. He says he doesn’t think that anyone really kills themselves. Evolution wouldn’t allow it. Depression is what kills them. The parasite that pulls the trigger—that’s not you.

But that adds up to the beginning of a very different story.

My father didn’t kill himself. I shook the pill bottles on his nightstand, all as full as they come. I looked for a note and found nothing. I found his guns stowed safely in his closet.

No, my father had a heart attack.

And I cannot quite bring myself to tell the story that’s not so neat, that has false leads. I always come back to starting with Ziva, with the narratively neat omen.

But that’s not how life works.

…

In one of my writing projects, a character with PTSD seeks and gets a chance to watch video footage of one of the most traumatic events in her life.

It’s re-traumatizing to watch, but she’s obsessed with what details the following flashbacks, nightmares, time, retellings, and additional trauma have blurred.

When asked if seeing the “truth” made her feel better, she says it’s complicated.

I understand that. The sequence is definitely something born of my own emotions.

I wonder what I would do if I had the same opportunity.

Really, I know I could never resist. I know it would be traumatizing all over again. I know my final answer would be it’s complicated.

Still.

…

I have three basic PTSD nightmare templates that seem to cycle on a loop, though inconsistently.

In one, we’re moving, or buying a rental property. In any case, we’re touring a house, sometimes empty, sometimes model home. Either way, there’s always a bed in one room with a corpse in it. And it’s never addressed in the dream, really. A sigh of, “We’d have to get a biohazard team in again… the ozone machine…” as if we’re fixing a plumbing issue.

In another, someone dies, and it’s dramatic but often off screen. It’s emotion based, a montage of the trauma, grief, and logistics to follow. Pro se probate court and handling of possessions, telling people, paperwork, and the talking, talking, talking. I’ve been through the process enough. Dad. Later, Grandma, too, lies, lays, all too still in her bedroom, but it’s been minutes, not days, and family talks around her.

In the most common dream, though, I’m talking to my dad. Sometimes someone else, but most often him. Sometimes he prods me to remember something. Sometimes, it hits me all on its own. “You’re dead,” I’ll remember, often aloud, in the dream. And he’ll immediately decay, turning into the ten day old version of his corpse.

I can run down the templates easily. I’ve done it so often, my best friend had a nightmare identical to the third version, though they never met my father, dead or alive, just heard about a hundred versions of this dream. They woke from it once in the way I’ve woken from it a hundred times: bolting upright, in a cold sweat, panting, shaking, and desperately trying to scream.

…

Narrative therapy is supposed to address these stories we tell ourselves. And stories can be therapeutic. After that long, awful day, nausea fading to the realization I’d had only a smoothie that morning, when offered any choice I wanted—“You found your father’s ten day old corpse today. You can pick the restaurant.”—I chose Panera, because that’s where I used to go every Tuesday, for the local National Novel Writing Month meetup, to talk and write and eat and get lost in stories like the rest of the week hadn’t happened, which always made it feel safe.

And by editing those stories, we edit our outlook.

There’s a lot of potential I see here, as a mentally ill writer.

Change the narrator—cue empathy.

Change where it begins—add context.

Change the focus—change the moral of the story.

Change where it “ends”—add hope.

Changing your fate is a common theme in fiction.

I don’t feel like the story I tell myself really has an ending. It fades into other thoughts at various points. Probably for the best.

But soon enough, I always find myself back at the beginning: with Ziva.

Assorted Illnesses and Language (A Conlang Concept)

As someone into grammar and linguistics, who debates the requirements of a split infinitive and the correctness of implied antecedents and whether you can punctuate dialogue with semicolons, for fun, language is in my head a lot. 

As someone with schizophrenia, not to mention autism, language gets messy. 

I’ve pondered making a mini conlang based on superlatives. 

Tired, tireder, tiredest. 

The thing is that the difference between “tired” or “very tired” or “sleepy” or “exhausted” can mean very different things to lots of people. 

To me, “exhausted” clearly meant, “I am about to fall asleep on my feet and it is hazardous for me to stand up.” I found out that apparently, other people use exhausted to mean what I call pretty sleepy—a strong urge towards going to bed as things got hazy. 

Additionally, I separated mental and physical energy in a way a lot of people apparently do not. I can be ready for a long, productive writing session while barely able to sit up. Much less frequently, on the other side, I can be nonverbal and ready to run a mile. Their correlation is low if not nonexistent. 

Plus, it can be hard to describe things that are incredibly subjective or an uncommon experience. How dissociated are you? How intrusive are the hallucinations? How bad is the sensory overload? This isn’t a new problem—say, pain—if you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, you’ve seen a chart of smiley faces and numbers desperately trying to solve it.

So I pondered a sort of mini loglang that would use some extremely simple ways to describe certain spectrums, to be used between me and people its relevant to. I faced the reality that they would go “which one was that word again?” and I would tell them the definition, which meant I should just start with that definition. It still might be useful for journaling or something, and it’s still in my mind. 

Say, tired, tireder, tiredest, sleepy, exhausted, mental and physical energy. 

It could be given a rating system, maybe 1-5. 

MentalTired1—messing up a few words now and then, a bit slow to catch hidden meaning or jokes, not coming up with brilliant ideas. 

to

MentalTired5—nonverbal, and non responsive to language input.

or 

PhysicalTired1—notable muscle fatigue, depending on cause, might be slightly short of breath/sweating. 

to 

PhysicalTired5—it is hazardous for me to be sitting up unsupported; will be unconscious shortly. 

Etc. 

There’s also the kinds of overlap—mental distress that creates physical symptoms. Anxiety and muscle tension, nausea, chest pain. Depression and lethargy. Hallucinating and dizziness. Sensory overload and headache. Things that can be hard to explain in English if you have only ever experienced the symptoms independently, or only the physical side. 

When tested for diagnosis, I took an IQ test, which I don’t find to be the one true measure of intelligence or all of what it’s sometimes made out to be, but it was interesting, and an example here— 

My verbal reasoning? 130. 

My spatial reasoning? 92. 

I’ve written millions of words of fiction in my life, never gotten a B in English, but I both miss doorways for walls and still have to do the L thing with my hands to find left and right on a daily basis. 

The difference between skills like that also influences how some days I can write a book but not sit up. 

When those physical and mental lines get blurry and when adjectives don’t describe symptoms, language gets tricky. At least English—I may have to look into others. 

What seems like a long time ago, I pondered going into a very specific form of being a therapist as a career based on what I would call conlang therapy—like art therapy, but creating with language. While being a mental health professional is not for me, and I have no idea if that as a therapy type would’ve been really feasible, it was an interesting concept. 

Words make people feel powerful. It’s why we reclaim slurs, cling to favorite quotes and lyrics, wear some labels with pride. 

Surely there’s something to a therapy practice of building yourself up by making language that has failed you, work for you. 

Just a thought. 

Knowing Your Mind Is Vulnerable, and What You Do About It

I’m writing. It’s going really well. Pages and pages of ink in my beloved dot grid Moleskine. So many pages, I think to comment to friends about my comparatively unpretentious but equally beloved Bic pen that has somehow lasted me almost sixty total pages, plus about half of my previous Moleskine, and months of Word of the Day Post It notes, mailed letters, and other miscellany. I included a picture of the inside of the front cover of my notebook, a gift from my fiancee, with that inside cover inscribed by her at the spot we met on the second anniversary of it, a callback to our first conversation—notebooks. 

I write; I take a break to clean a few things when my back complains about sitting. I end up sitting on the bed and reading Writers on Writing, a New York Times essay compilation recommended from a workshop class. I go back to writing at my desk. It flows. Something else I can’t place my finger on keeps catching my attention. I put noise canceling headphones on that I’m borrowing from my fiancee, with a bit of Harry Potter themed ASMR with splashing water and bubbles. I remember putting them on and realizing how much white noise was in my brain for the first time as hallucinations worsened. Something keeps drawing my eyes. I think it’s black—a prominent color in my most terrifying recurring hallucination, but it’s not that—yet, at least.  

Maybe it’s the cat. Our fanged black cat naps on the bed. But every time my eyes dart to her, she’s still, not eye catching. The legs of my desk, the fabric drawers, my space heater, my knee socks, my desk chair, my computer screen fully dimmed since I’m just using the device for the ASMR—something black. It keeps coming in the corner of my eye. I turn on my task lamp, also black, but hoping the light will dispel some shadows. The other cat, a tortoiseshell, naps in the rope hammock swing, encased in my white canopy and starry string lights. 

My fiancee comes and asks if I want anything downstairs while she’s going. More black in the corner of my eye at first—her usual attire. I do a double take. No, she’s there. Water, I say.  

I get the words down a little faster, not sure how much longer they’re coming for. I’m behind on words for Camp NaNoWriMo, hoping for my tenth win of 50,000 words or more in a month—one past win being the 100 pages for the sister event for scripts—and I’m not sure yet how many words are actually on the page without the convenience of a computer’s word counter, having not typed them up. There are plenty of words crossed out for better ones, and random notes about the story or about things to add to the shopping list, places my handwriting ceases to know what a space is. If I don’t write now, with the first signs of my mind fading for a while, I’m probably not going to anymore today. 

She comes back with the water and leaves. The cat goes off to explore. 

I wish my hands moved faster or my characters got to the point faster. “I’m rambling,” one of the characters confesses. Yes, you are, I think at her, hands twitching. The black cloud seems to be flashing in and out faster. I should just write down a summary of the rest of this scene in case I don’t get to it. The chapter outline lives on my computer, a picture of my whiteboard and some added notes, but it’s missing snippets of dialogue and action that have just come to me as I approach them. I add more notes; I can’t seem to hold them in my head well anyway. I sense humanoid movement, which means it’s probably heading down the PTSD road; I keep seeing it in the mirrored closet doors next to my desk; I have that distinct sense of something behind me and turning around clears it for only a moment. 

It’s strange to worry about not being able to think. Day to day, it means not holding where this scene is going only in my head, just in case my mind goes mostly out for a few hours and comes back without those ideas. It means a bit of an obsession with certain paperwork. 

To be fair, reading Five Days at Memorial would give anyone an obsession with living wills, and I’ve gone and succeeded pro se in probate court with no will recently enough to have it in mind. Those aren’t really the papers I’m worried about yet. 

Right now, it’s mostly a piece of paper in the back of my notebook, my little “SHTF” paper. The sort of things I wish I had written down before the blur of my one abrupt psych ward stay, when I’d abandoned having such a note for a while. Emergency contacts. Basics.

Cat—a black blob in the bed—no, she’s on the carpet now—the blob flickers out. I glare at where it was, mostly over knowing I can’t see my psychiatrist for over three weeks to keep it flickered out. 

I called my psychiatrist first thing Monday morning after I committed to calling, because I’m psychotic but not irresponsible—fear of irresponsibility due to my mind fading out perhaps fueling those papers and other things. 

I put the appointment on one of my multiple Google Calendars. My fiancee once said I run my life like I’m a startup CEO rather than a housewife writer with some real estate. I might just be paranoid. She agrees to drive me to the appointment, if it’s not on Zoom. I don’t drive and while I keep tossing the idea around, I don’t want to one day swerve around a dog that isn’t there, like the one that accompanied me on my walk the other day, holding an also hallucinated leash in her mouth as she trotted next to me like it was helpful, flickering and then fading entirely by the time I got halfway to my destination. 

My therapist has had no luck finding me someone who knows more about psychosis on the therapy side, while I wait on meds, and neither have I. She says the laws apparently changed, according to a coworker of hers, and she’s allowed to treat it now, but no more knowledge qualified than she was before. I’m waiting on some books, library and mail order, my finds and my therapist’s, and enjoying JSTOR’s pandemic discounts, if research is only a grab in the dark for that responsibility and control. One book I’m waiting on is My Month of Madness—a paranoid long shot for usefulness, but autoimmune has definitely been thrown around before, and after months of pain turned out to be a rare manifestation of toxic black mold poisoning once, I try to not dismiss rare diagnoses out of hand. Yet I don’t want to fall into the “letting WebMD convince you that you have a brain tumor” trap.  

So honestly, I am mostly still at waiting, which is a lot of what treatment is. You’d think I’d be better at it by now. Waiting for the black blobs to get too consuming, waiting for my appointment, waiting for books.

I have many virtues, but patience and sanity are not among them. 

On Farrah and Treatment

I swore when my shoulder cramped, which was interesting, because I’d kind of assumed I was nonverbal at the moment, based on the way my thoughts flowed, or didn’t, and a familiar feeling somewhere in my throat, though I hadn’t tested it. 

I couldn’t blame my shoulder for cramping; my disorientation at speaking came with the realization that I’d been lying on my office floor staring at the very bottom of my bookshelves again. 

Against my back, I felt Farrah, my recurring puppy hallucination, slump, and heard her whimper for attention, wet nose near my neck. The theme of the morning’s tactile hallucinations seemed to be—weight. Farrah’s dense little body in my hands, slumping against my back in the same manner the cats did, cold paws pressing at spots on my lap.  

Just to spite my saying to my therapist yesterday that the tactile and visual hallucinations didn’t line up and Farrah teleported away if I tried to get close, the hallucinations started to line up, and she started wanting to cuddle.  

She’d been clingy all morning, and while she didn’t talk, I felt or knew her thoughts in a way that was hard to explain—the way you knew the facts in dreams that were never presented in a sensory manner. She was disheartened by my therapy video chat yesterday that came to the conclusion—I might need to go back on meds. Probably, in fact. 

I’m not trying to get rid of you, was what I thought at Farrah, because this was stupid. She wasn’t real, and so wasn’t sad that I was trying to stop seeing her—and honestly, she was the least of my issues I was trying to stop seeing. Her behavior was just the manifestation of my own mixed feelings about likely going back on meds. 

My old psychiatrist’s office wasn’t open on weekends, though, and there were no calls to be made just yet. So Farrah—claws pattering on the hardwood and somersaulting clumsily down the stairs and getting stuck in the legs of my desk and trying to eat the real cats’ food—kept me company all morning and into the afternoon.  

I found myself editing a picture I’d found online that kind of looked like her, to get the image closer to right, as if trying to appease her—see, you’re not going away, you can live in a picture, I can still know what you look like, even if it’s in a healthier format. 

I also have developed a bit of an obsession with where Farrah came from. I only have two specific recurring hallucinations currently; one is straight out of a PTSD flashback; I’m very aware of where it came from. The other is Farrah. Any others are not coherent enough to be called recurring. Those little imaginary flashes of light, flips of still objects, white noise I can’t pin down. 

The only real dog I see regularly looks, sounds, feels, and acts nothing like Farrah. I can’t figure out if Farrah is my mental manifestation of dog or puppy or golden retriever or… what word my brain might have decided to attach to, that conjured this particular image. I’m not much of a dog person; that’s why my two real pets are cats. Google told me what Farrah meant—I know no real Farrahs and have no personal associations with the name, its origin in a language I don’t speak. I keep staring her down, thinking: Why are you here? 

I get at most a wag of the tail or a yip back. 

It’s a big question for a little puppy that’s not even real. 

Talking about it in therapy was strangely disheartening to me, too, because those closest to me are very used to the quirks of my physical and mental health, or at least know reacting strongly isn’t going to change it. I forget how concerning certain things sound to the average person, and I’d been out of touch with my therapist for a bit there, when I’d been doing well. 

Also disheartening was the fact that, as my psychosis spikes up again, my therapist, an MFT, is not really qualified to treat it. Therapy is not the front line treatment for schizophrenia as it is—medication is. It’s an issue we’ve discussed before. I used to have a second therapist, the psychologist who initially diagnosed me, who my therapist referred me to shortly after I started seeing her in 2015, but the psychologist sadly passed on less than a year later, and I haven’t had that second person to treat that side of my illness since. 

I can write up new medical files and go back to meditation and read more psychology books and call my psychiatrist and go to my current therapist and do some therapy workbook activities and all, and I have—but having a qualified professional to talk to is a good resource.

But, hard to find. The only name my therapist came up with off the top of her head to bring in didn’t take my insurance. I’ve had many nightmare therapists and I’ve had many who were good people who admitted they were in over their heads. The web told me that my old psychologist, the one who passed four years ago, is currently accepting new patients. 

The only real thing to do is maintain routines and wait, and wonder if it would work if I carried clumsy Farrah down the stairs.