I actually wrote (a really long) post yesterday and then lost the whole thing when I tried to preview it. I guess it's just as well - I'll try to keep this shorter and more readable:

I'm 51 yo married woman. I guess I've suffered from PTSD probably all of my life although I've only ever been diagnosed with it's separate components. My family of origin was extremely dysfunctional. My parents were 40 years old when I was born. I was also 12 years younger than the sibling closest in age to me. It was like I was born into a family that was already "over" and "done".

Here's a cross-section of the family events coincident with my second year of life - 1959 - Brooklyn NY:

My mother was still grieving the still-born death of a daughter for which she had no support or understanding. My mother was the "super" in our building and had to literally scrub the floors on her hands and knees and shovel coal while raising four kids.

My father had had his fourth or fifth heart attack. They started in his thirties. He became very frustrated at not being able to work and with the family struggling financially. He had to quit his job on the docks of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The official medical prescription was to sit on the couch and "do as little as possible" (in other words a death sentence). The unofficial prescription was to sit on the couch waiting to die and vent your frustration at everyone else.

My brother (16 yo) (the biggest target of said frustration) went to jail for gang-fighting. Think: West Side Story...

My sister (12 yo) was on her tenth year of daily physical therapy to learn to walk again after being diagnosed with Polio in infancy. We found out in her fifties that she never had polio. It was a series of strokes in infancy a/k/a Cerebral Palsy. That would explain the extremely low I.Q. that Polio never accounted for... It also accounted for the fact that hers was the ONLY case of Polio in Brooklyn that year.

My other sister (18 yo) died of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect. Despite the fact that she'd been hospitalized two or three times with pneumonia, the connection was never made with her heart. In those days they didn't listen to the heart from the back only the front of the chest. Had they listened from the back, they would have heard. Apparently, her case is one of those that was instrumental in listening from the back becoming common practice. She died just before graduation from High School. From what I've been told she was the "picture of health" until the day she died.

I had to have surgery for a Baker's cyst and had a reaction to the anesthesia keeping me in the hospital for several weeks.

I can't say I remember much about this time in my life - if anything at all. I strongly suspect that I may have experienced some neglect and some over-smothering as a result of these tragic things. One thing of which I am sure, is that on an energetic/emotional level I absorbed the strong emotions in the family associated with these events. I've been told only recently by an older second cousin that "it's too bad I didn't know my parents before Ann died, they were different people". I was robbed.

My memories start to come in clearer around four or so... My sister (the one with so-called Polio) was a handful. Combative to the extreme (and emotionally unstable) she was the source of many fights between my parents. My take is that they weren't greiving the loss of their first born together just relying on the only acceptable shared emotion - anger. I remember lot of viscious fights. I remember covering my head with the pillow for what seemed like hours. Neither did they confront their other daughter's disability directly. Especially my mother - it was like she "just couldn't see it" - she classified her as "lazy" because she wouldn't do as expected. In all fairness these were different days as to the "handicapped". It was stigma to be avoided if you could. She resented me from the word go and we were never close. Not that we really had a chance anyway with the age difference.

I don't remember a lot of drinking at this time although I've been told my father definitely drank. It may be that his health had stopped him from drinking at this point.

My brother, however, when he got home from jail took up with the daughter of a police detective (by this time, we'd moved to Queens) and they were married (both 18) in no time with a baby on the way. There was a lot of drinking in her family and before long my parents were partying with her parents - one big happy family! Their first baby was followed within the same year by twins. Babies raising babies and being overwhelmed by babies. My nieces and nephew were closer in age to me than my own siblings but I never really fit with either group - age-wise or any other-wise.

The fighting continued - violent - things thrown - hateful words - hysterics.

I was never the target of any of this except one time when my dad really whaled away on my for some stupid toddler thing involving me not staying away from the Christmas tree as I'd been told. For the mostpart though, I was daddy's girl and mommy's girl too - but it was always seperate.

When I was nine, my dad did finally die. His heart just gave out in bed one morning before he got up. We were within days of having moved to a brand new apartment - it was going to be really cool - it had two floors and I had my own bedroom. The problem was that the whole place was painted navy blue - ceilings and walls. My dad painted all the rooms by himself. These were the days of only oil paints and maybe it was the fumes - maybe it was the physical effort - maybe it was just his time...

I was the only one at home and I must have had a premonition because despite being a model student and loving school (my only escape from the fighting), I refused to go to school that day.

My mother finally gave in, went to work and left me alone in the house with my sleeping dad.

At some point during the day, it occured to me that my dad hadn't gotten out of bed yet. I'm not sure at what point I finally worked up the nerve to go into the bedroom. I remember reaching out and touching his arm which was ice cold.

I have very scantly memories after that. I remember being afraid of my seeing my mother's face when she found discovered that he was dead. I remember that as my over-riding fear. I'm not really sure what that means. I don't remember being afraid for myself per se, just seeing/feeling my mother's reaction.

I guess I went into some kind of emotional shock because my grandparents lived downstairs and I never even went downstairs. I never called my mother at work though I'm not sure I would have known the phone number. I don't know how many hours I was alone with the body - I have no memory.

When my mother finally did come home, it was like I was "snapped out of it" and I ran upstairs to my room. I was questioned, escorted downstairs to my grandparents and left alone (probably not a great idea after all those hours alone) in their apartment while everyone upstairs waited for the coroner. This took hours and the afternoon became night.

I remember their apartment being dark. I remember that that old movie "Joan of Arc" was on the t.v. but I wasn't watching it. I remember watching out the front windows when they rolled my dad's body in a body bag into the ambulance.

I was sick for two weeks after this. I couldn't get out of bed. I remember having frightening dreams about my father - cartoon dreams - but scary. When I finally went back to school, I fainted at the blackboard while doing a math problem. Believe it or not - I've sucked at math ever since. They told my mother that I had a "mental block" about math.

In interesting note on school. When this happened, I had just been "skipped" from the third grade to the fifth. In those days, if they decided you didn't need a grade - they just "skipped" you past it - damn the social issues. I was no longer amongst my friends in schools even - I had to go to school with these bigger, more savvy, brutish fifth graders. Now I was the girl with the "dead father" and boy was I teased. For having a dead father, can you believe it?

Well, by way of supportive counsel in terms of talking about this awful event with a parent, psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker, teacher, aunt, uncle - I had nothing. Nothing. I don't even remember my father being mentioned again for years. Maybe that's what my mother thought I needed - I don't know.

So now it was me, my disabled/combative sister and my (by now) outrightly crazy mother. They chose to spend their nights and I mean every night - drinking beer and arguing. My sister would come home from work (no doubt a job that she just was incapable of doing) and complain about her co-workers and how badly treated she was. My mother would try to argue, cajole and otherwise "talk" her out of her feelings. This would follow the course of several bottles of beer and then it would be an screeching drunken argument.

My mother had started to become paranoid and some nights she would have us push furniture against the apartment door because she swore someone was trying to break in. Her paranoia slowly extended to family and freinds whom she'd thought had slighted or "judged" her in some way over the years. This sickness took years and years to play out and I only really started "seeing" it for what it was as an adult.

First casualty was my father's family: gone - out of our lives. Then members of her own family, then various friends. Gone never to be mentioned again - except in venemous tones. We were slowly isolating into drunken hell.

My mother and I (when I was adolscent/young teen) would baby-sit for my brother's kids practically every Friday/Saturday night while he and my sister-in-law went out partying. By now in addition to alcohol, drugs were featured prominently in their lives. My neices and nephews were acting out all over the place and it was always chaotic at their house. For me this was refreshing - it was life and movement and laughter - compared to the darkness and despair I was used to at home. Incredible.

Very frequently, they would come home drunk or high and get into an epic fight (my brother and his wife). They made my parents look like they were playing patty-cake. I remember instances when furniture was thrown across the room tools thrown the basement stairs and things literally thrown through walls. Many times my mother actually called the police. Of course, she became totally enmeshed in their domestic problems.

Around this time, I started hanging out with my own friends. I had some nice friends - as dysfunctional as I was and we were like family. It was also the seventies on the streets of New York and we indulged in lots of pot and alcohol. I managed to get in lots of trouble and still be home by 10:00 which was my curfew. I was afraid of my mother and also very afraid of putting her over the edge so I was always home by curfew. Lots of times I was quite high but I was home. I dabbled in stronger drugs here and there but I was always too afraid to lose control of it. I always felt responsible for my mother. Thank God for that particular brand of Co-dependence -- it probably saved my life. One of my closest friends died of severe alcoholism at 32 and another more recently at 50.

So of course men had to come into it sooner or later. I married my first husband who it turned out had terrible Tourette's Syndrome. Didn't see that one coming. I was so isolated and ignorant, I believed him when he told me his symptoms were "allergies". That marriage ended after two years and one beautiful daughter. One of his symptoms was to curse me at the top of his lungs over and over and over. It was like being tortured. In order to quell his misery he drank exactly one bottle of Chivas Regal a night. When he got drunk his inhibitions would relax and his symptoms would go wild! So every night I was treated to his screaming, cursing, hitting his stomach over and over, pulling out his hair, his eyelashes and breaking his eyeglasses. He drove a NYC taxi and would have to hold his tics in all day long - so at night he would let them go. The alcohol assisted him in this process. I left with my baby when I was twenty-four. No child support - just freedom. He died without ever knowing his daughter at 52.

My second husband was an old friend - suffice it to say I should have know better. Controlling and fearful. That lasted five years.

My current husband of almost twenty years is the love of my life. We are having problems now due to my co-dependence and his workaholism. We've both recently given up drinking altogether - even though (I don't think) we were alcoholic but given our family histories and the fact that we're both in different twelve step programs - our eyes were opened. He's in Workaholics Anonymous and I'm in Adult Children of Alcoholics.



I've been a nervous wreck my whole life. I've developed an autoimmune thyroid/adrenal disorder which I've been working on with diet. I suffer panic attacks and can't drive on highways, through tunnels or over bridges. I've been diagnosed with low-grade depression and ADHD. I've always had really bad insomnia and for a good length of time, sleep was a horrible issue for me. The diet has helped with that quite a bit and (I believe) nutritional supplements most notably fish oil. I also have a fear of doctors and medical tests and stuff.

So sorry about the length of this post. I realized at some point that this was getting way too long but it felt so good to say these things - some of them for the first time.

Thank you for listening. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I've never had a lot of luck with therapists. I get too anxious to really share anything too painful. I feel like I'm right back in that moment when I was afraid to see "mommy's reaction". I can't speak of some of these things. Unfortunately, my body's speaking for me and it's a race against the clock if you know what I mean...

Even in my ACOA meetings, sometimes I feel like I'm on the brink of saying something and I start to have a panic attack. I can't handle the feelings - my body gets overwhelmed. Lately, I can actually feel (what feels like clenching) in my adrenal glands during this kind of attack. It's very scary.

I have a therapist now who feels we shouldn't dwell on the past but I feel as though part of me is stuck there. Like I can't go forward. Now I feel guilty about "wanting to dwell" there. Yikes. I have to end it with my therapist now because of this - it's a waste of money - I feel there's something back there I need to deal with.

Can anyone relate?

moonmaiden - Pat