New here & my story

Hi all,

I was searching around for self-help material and communities online for PTSD sufferers and found this site. I thought it might be good to join and sort things out.

My story is, what I learn now, many layers of PTSD over my entire life that I choose to supress rather than confront.

I grew up in a very conservative family with traditional values. My father suffered PTSD from his time in the military but in the 1980s there was no treatment for such things where I was growing up. Alcoholism slipped into this for my father, and for me learning to be obedient to your parents and they are always right though I was too young to realise they are not and they had severe issues they never worked out (though they are even still today married). The alcoholism was always masked in my family, agressive behavior and being hit for minor things did happen, and all of it was hidden behind being a model church going family.

Through my teenage years I became heavily involved in Scouting as an escape, eventually obtaining the highest ranks and becoming highly trained in handling traumatic situations as a first responder. I was fully qualified to respond to accidents, disasters, fires, search & rescue and highly stressfull situations and trained to have training take over and not let the stress in.

This culminated for me in early 2008 when I was involved in a serious road crash. Nearly 2 years later I still do not know what happened, whose fault it was or the specifics. What I do know is I was a passenger in a car hit head on and trapped for 2 hours until cut out of the vehicle. The health service rather handled recovery poorly and further trauma occurred from that and I had limited recovery assistance. My family all lives in America as well and I was left rather alone to recover apart from my wife who herself was seriously injured. Before the accident I had never broke a bone or had any serious injury. Afterwards I was in critical condition for 4 days and nearly lost several times in the hospital. During the event, afterwards, and even today my old training kicks in to handle, assess and deal with the event as an emergency technician would rather than experience and allow the stress of the situation to happen and then be treated.

I have tried private counselling which was beneficial for 3 months but really only unwrapped my longer childhood issues and that I need to feel accepted as having PTSD and not just a basket case.

For the most part I'm generally fine, but when a trigger happens, often continuing insurance questions of what happened during the crash and trying to sort it all out, I dive very quickly into panic attacks. My vision becomes blurry, I try escaping the situation thinking it is all my fault and I'm to blame and should be punished, and all the typical symptoms from nausia to not eating will last from a day to 3 or 4.

Having never experienced trauma myself, and being highly trained to handle it in others but helpless to handle it myself is very frustrating to me. I've read the self help books and other accounts of trauma which help in the feeling I am not alone, but there always is the feeling of when 'things will be back to normal' again.