I am looking to talk with other men who have PTSD so I can feel on an equal footing with someone. I was first abused as a very young child and then a few years ago I had my throat slit and stabbed 5 times and all of it was put in the same pot and cooked and stirred into a very toxic soup. Just a casual hello out there to other PTSD survivors.
Larry

Yo -
I'm 59 yo male PTSD dude. So . . . .
Welcome. I never got cooked up or throat slid . . . nasty. I have a brother-in-law who got his throat slit by a broken bear bottle. He was watching a race related riot . . . somewhere he was stationed while in the navy . . . and a fella came up behind him and whacked him. He and his buddies found the guy in the head later and had their way with him.

I had a gun put to my head, had a gay dude slip up in the night and grab my dick after lights out, and had a laundry catch fire on ship after lights out. Made it hard sleeping, bad insomnia. Really bad nightmares too. The nightmares have gone away. All I have are good dreams now. Can't wait to go to sleep . . . when I can sleep anyway. I got more friends that come to visit me when I sleep than I can count or remember. One is a girl friend, Grace Larine. Very sweet girl.

So then, San Diego . . . I lived there from 6 mo to 4 1/2 yrs old. 1948 to 1952. Nice back then. Then I was stationed there in the Navy as main port down at the Naval base, sure you know where that is. USS Ogden LPD-5. Probably still stationed there. The gun to the head, fire and dick grabbing incident all happened on that ship. My ship mates . . . great bunch. Oh, ya. My first week on the ship I got to witness the brutal beating of a gay sailor and got threatened with the same thing.

This was back 1968 and judges were giving criminals the option of going into the service or spending time in jail. Thanks your honor . . . really damaged the quality and integrity of the crew. Was rather stressful being basically on a chain gang . . . I got a rating E-4 and got transfered out as fast as I could. Still what a bunch of lamo's . . . these criminals had uses some times. Like the guy who threatened to beat me up, and who beat up the gay guy once went down to a welding team while we were in dry dock . . . . it was after lights out and they were using an air hammer to chop out some hatch . . . course it echo'ed horrible all over the ship . . anyway . . . he went back there and threatened to kill the guy making the noise. Now that is the kind of effective and decisive action that makes the us navy great.

Last time I drove through the area several months ago in LA. . . man that traffic is brutal. A free for all. Such assholes I've never seen . . . it was like drive aggressive or get run off the road.

So what's up . . . how did this getting cooked happen.

reply to TDurden1937,
Thanks for your words. Now I didn't get cooked physically, but I was trying to say that the memories of the childhood abuse plus the more recent neck slitting and stabbing got connected in my mind and "cooked together to make a toxic stew" meaning it's all ****ed up in my head and I can't really get to thoughts because the feeling overwhelm me before I can put a few thoughts together. The neck slicing happened when a gardner from the home I had stole something small and never came back to work. Then 10 years later he shows up at my door and says he was looking for work. I had forgotten that he was the one who had stolen from me because it had been so long. When I went to type his telephone number into my computer he is behind me and I felt a cold metal on my neck slightly but actually what got my attention was that there was a flood of warm stuff running down my chest. My mind just said, "This is not what I think it is", but it was. I fought and almost got the knife away from him but my massive blood loss kept making me go weak, so I stopped fighting and just lurched to where there was an alarm emergency button. It went off, broadcasting real loud the recording that it was telephoning to the police. He ran out the door and I thought I was going to die of blood loss before the police arrived so I went outside. My neighbors were just pulling up in their driveway and saw me covered in red and asked why I was so messy with the painting that they thought I must be doing. Into their car to the nearest hospital, helicoptered to another hospital, lots of operations and recovery but no mental problems and then about a few weeks later I started blacking out and losing big portions of my days. I would miss a business apointment and wondered where 3 hours went to. Then to psychologist and when we started to talk I was so overwhelmed that I couldn't think, just feel confused and sad. Real sad. Then very powerful flashbacks that seemed very real. Then psyc meds, moved out of that house, moved out of the country, but whereever I went, it followed me. All communication with people seemed to have connections with the traumas that I feel but can't really undestand logically. That's it. I can see from what you've told me about yourself that you, too, are reved up by the memories. What I do when I can't sleep is I get up and read or whatever, but I don't try to sleep. Then a few hours later, especially after I eat, I find that I go to sleep. So I get 8 hours of sleep but it's in chuncks. I'm on permanent Soc. Sec. disability, so I don't work. Also I can go thru periods where I sleep 24 hrs a day and just get up to eat, that has gone on for months at a time.