I found myself, on my sofa this weekend, feeling horribly sick, “seeing” a thing that happened more than 10 years ago. A single, traumatic event. In which I, and others, might have died. Text book event to trigger PTSD. This is not a surprise. But, the clear response was something I haven’t experienced in that way for some years.

But, I am learning so much all the time, now I am in a place where I *can* learn, with less clouding, and contamination.

People are not supposed to live the way I lived. All the way through. And, if you grow up with that, and it’s never pointed out, all you now is that it is normal. The feelings that go with it, they can’t be normalised, but they don’t have any reason. So, it all becomes illness.

Which is not to say it is not illness, because it certainly hurts, but, it is not always the illness you end up labelled with. Funnily enough, one of the things I learnt this weekend, is that people with actually PTSD, particularly based on a chromic experience, can often times be misdiagnosed with bipolar.

Which is not to say I am convinced that I don’t need that label. I have lived with it for a long time. I know it,  I am comfortable with it’s movements, with how it wrinkles through my mind. But, I am also sure that the effects of everything else leave much deeper, harder to live with, harder to accommodate, trails through my brain, like soot.

These things are difficult, and I still learn things that I have mislabelled as things that are supposed to have happened to me, because I am different, less, I deserve such things. it’s only hearing / seeing other people discuss their own histories that helps me understand what it is that happened in my own past.

There are things I know are wrong in relation to being a parent, but which I still thought were OK for my experience of being a child, because I caused x, or because y is my fault, so… These are all typical trauma response. I wonder if I hadn’t been dismissed so often, if I hadn’t come from such a nice, engaged, involved place, maybe people would have listened more to what I was actually saying.

But, in reality, this doesn’t matter. What matters are the years I have lived with all of this, and accepted my, not human, status. The people who have been cross with me because I can’t see myself in the way they think is right, or healthy. The people who are angry because they can’t understand why I don’t do or think as they would do or think.

I didn’t understand why I couldn’t, so I just felt more ashamed and incapable. And I am not there yet, but, I am learning. Things are moving.

The other problem is that, as a country I feel us all being pulled into a version of what I lived. And It’s hard to understand how to mitigate that. Maybe it won’t be like this for everyone. But, the risk is there that it will definitely be for some, and even worse for others. I feel it already.

So, it all runs together. And I learn more, and then I forget it while I am in the middle of feeling. And then I look back and realise that I am *trying* to mitigate it, and always have been. Some times with better ways than other times. The reaching out I do trying to talk about nothing, when I have the huge panic that says talk to someone, CONNECT with someone, get someone else to acknowledge that you are REAL. It’s a kind of urgent, sick, anxiety. That feels absolutely life and death.

I don’t think people know that. I don’t think it would be better if they did. But, if *I* understand it, maybe I can sit in the anxiety, and NOT reach out, until I am ready to be a better, more open, more selfless friend. Maybe this is why I can’t connect in a real way.

This leads to another issue. I mean, some things are not my fault. But, some times are my fault, and it  is important to learn more, so that I don’t pile that onto other actual human beings. It doesn’t work. It hurts people, and then they hurt back. And that just causes more damage, for everyone involved.

So, I learn that trauma keeps causing more trauma. Like Some kind of animal. But, you don’t know you are feeding the animal if you don’t understand what is happening. Which makes it cruel in the extreme. A thing you can make worse, because you don’t know what it is.

it *is* possible to live through some things that other people can easily spot as traumatic, and not realise. It is not wrong to not realise, it’s just part of the problem.

It takes many, many interventions, many times of having one’s attention drawn to things which are not right, or part of the problem, if you really don’t know that. It is not simple.

I am only starting to make progress in understanding with *actual* understanding now. After this long. And I worry that I know people who will be more angry about this. But I am also still frightened of upsetting, or failing the primary people. So essentially, being afraid is the basic emotion that exists in my being. And it’s taken this long living in an environment where that is not objectively justifiable, to be able to see that. And that is, in itself, frightening.

But, perhaps, also, progress.