Yo ladies, I wrote this for my blog today but I also thought you all might be interested in what I am reading about PTSD and how to treat it.  I'd post it for everyone TIP but I am sick of being attacked all the time for taking ADHD meds and being helped by them which I am told makes me responsible for every overmedicated child in the USA.  I am thinking of just leaving TIP altogether because it's just so unsafe and unsupportive of people who find meds that work for them, and I am sick of being attacked.  Does anyone know how I can take my TIP blog down?  Thanks, I hope you all are well, I wish you all would post more, I miss you.

I am reading a book by Paul Gilbert called the Compassionate Mind, and although I am trying to focus on animism, polytheism, regenerative living, and ecopsychology in this blog, I wanted to say some stuff about brain chemistry. I think it is relevant to anyone interested in nature studies because we ARE nature and evolution designed our systems very wisely. This book is the very best at explaining the nature/science behind that evolution and why we have the systems/feelings we have. In having that understanding, I DO have more compassion for myself and my sufferings with extreme complex PTSD.
 
If you don’t know, complex PTSD can develop in someone when they have prolonged experiences of life threatening situations. It could be war, like the repeated tours of combat duty the US is forcing on the military now for the FIRST time EVER (expect a mess when they all come home), it could be living in a gang war zone, it could be childhood sexualized abuse by a care giver, it could be being held hostage, it could be being kept in a concentration camp, it could be living in a domestic violence situation you cannot leave. When the body is under long term stresses that severe, the fight/flight/freeze system fires all the time – the neurons that fire together wire together, as any good psychiatrist will tell you. Take away the war, the abusive family, the prison cell, the torture chamber, or what have you, and that survival system is still wired for threat detection. I can tell myself endlessly that no one is trying to kill me but sometimes my hormonal/neurological system is not going to trust that. I used to be mad at that and want it to be taken out of me, like many PTSD patients I wanted therapy to just make it stop. But one thing I am now noticing is that that system loves me more than perhaps anyone or anything I have ever encountered. So when the anxiety builds and I am sure that someone is outside ready to kill me and my heart races and I dissociate until I worry that my body is fading and I basically feel like I am on a horrible acid/coke binge, for some reason I don’t take the Valium or even my B vitamins! Even if I listen to 7 mindfulness and relaxation meditations of my iPod, the system will not stop. Although I know that crying will lower the intensity and make me relax once I am done, I won’t allow that to happen. Because as awful as that Hell of flashback is, it is trying to keep me safe. Taking a valium or the B vitamins, crying, or anything that might stop its power feels on a very deep level like a threat. That system no matter how much I curse it loves me and it is not going to let me be defenseless. It is fighting to stay active because it loves me.
 
The Compassionate Mind gave me a much greater understanding of how this evolved and also what other systems are in my body. The acquiring drive, stimulated by dopamine’s short-lived high, makes sure we are motivated to have a home and food – and gets exploited by advertizing I think – since shopping, sexual conquest, corporate raiding, competitive sports, war, making money just to make money creates that nice high, which actually is very similar to cocaine. (Hence when people stop doing meth they often start gambling or hunting for porn all night, it creates the high internally.) That fight/flight/freeze system is fueled by cortisol. Cortisol is awesome when a lion is leaping out of a bush, a flood is rushing to town, or a neighboring tribe suddenly arrives to set your village on fire. However, too much of it at constant levels and things like that hard, big belly so common on Americans develops. Health problems galore start. We were not designed to fight traffic, worry about losing our homes, work for mean people and be bullied all day, hear for hours news reports about wars and deaths, deal with your daughter’s crack addiction, etc. The fight/flight/freeze system is supposed to activate in a short term bursts. Because we have moved so far from the lifestyle that created us, that we evolved within, we have that system in low level alert most of the term. If you have PTSD it is on high level alert most of the time. And it’s not your fault. When like most Americans you have insomnia and end up taking Nyquil and Benedryl in desperation to get to sleep, you aren’t a failure – You are being forced to live in a stressful way that your body isn’t capable of handling. Your body is used to a life where you will only see 100 people, knowing who is a liar, who is generous, who is to be avoided, etc from birth. You wouldn’t have constant strangers arriving that you have to impress and yet prepare to be threatened by all day, every day, on freeways, in grocery stores, at the PTA meeting. You know that your tribe, like a wolf pack or a whale pod, is not going to let you starve or be homeless. If you commit a crazy crime though you might be sacrificed or banished from the tribe, the worst fate imaginable. That actually is why we have that drive to belong, to fit in, to be loved, to be part of a team, to be so status conscious. It genetically is in us as a way to survive. The story of the lone wolf is a lie (and a good for social Darwinists to scare us with!). Lone wolves die very quickly. Yeah, there are the alpha dogs, like there are alpha humans, but alpha dogs do not let the other dogs starve! Cooperation is how humans have survived. We are puny and defenseless – but our ability to communicate and work together allowed us to survive. There are no Neiche Supermen in tribal life, the life that humans lived for most of our history. (Enjoying extastentialism and Pink Floyd in my experience are the two main things that make men different from women. And maybe liking Rush.)
 
But what system helped us do that, to be in a tribe, to care for each other like wolves and chimps and ants and bees and lions and flock birds etc etc? The content system. When animals are not threatened and are not acquiring food, what are they doing? If you have a cat or dog, you know this answer. They are lying happily in the sun or with their pack humans. Chimps groom each other in nice soothing ways, wolves nuzzle each other, snakes lie in the sun on a nice hot rock. This system should be the default system for humans, but it’s the least functional one for most of us. I wish they’d make a drug that could stimulate oxytocin, the bonding hormone that makes people feel kind and safe, but imagine if they did? How could you scare people into submission with God and karma? How could you make them hate their bodies, their lives, their very selves? How could you sell illegal wars like Iraq, face lifts, SUVs, fancy watches, or useless plastic junk? Imagine a world of people saying, “No, I don’t need to own a 4G cell phone, I’m content with the 3G network.” Society would crumble, so I doubt anyone is going to make a drug that helps people feel content with their life, where they want to be kind, not competitive. It would be the most subversive thing against capitalism and fundamentalist Christianity and Islam.
 
Recently I have been hearing in science circles that oxytocin might be what allowed humans to survive at all. Women have more of it than men because we have to bond to our kids or we’d leave them pretty quickly what with all the crying and screaming they do.  I think sex and falling in love also can create it, with makes people get married, but the chemicals involved in falling in love, which are known to actual make people unrealistic, do wear off, so they might be other chemicals, so it might be a dopamine thing.  Cooperative societies actually create brains that fire more of the neuron pattern for contentment, and thus wire brains that are more happy, loving, and peaceful. Warlike societies do not, and we’re at the top of that list. No one might be bombing your town, but worrying about downsizing, getting an unexpected hospital bill, having a drunk driver side swipe your car, and hearing that the neighbors got robbed are constant threats that in a lot of societies would not be there. The more the fight/flight/freeze system fires, the more it wires, so we become more angry, more scared, more depressed. This is another reason to have compassion – We’re born into a world we didn’t create.
 
This book is helping me understand what is happening in me when I have a PTSD episode – and to not beat myself up. The worst thing about PTSD in a very real way, which I think is true for most mental and even physical illnesses, is that you often feel very ashamed and self hateful. Your boyfriend doesn’t understand why you cannot watch Ultimate Fighting Champion with him, your boss doesn’t understand why you’ve been hiding in the bathroom shaking and throwing up for three hours, your parents don’t understand why you aren’t reaching your full potential, your friends don’t understand why you won’t leave your house and are afraid to walk by the windows. And often, people with PTSD don’t know why they are shaking, crying, getting dizzy, having intense emotions of rage and terror, cannot go to work, cannot drive, cannot have sex with the person they know loves them, are kicking out a window, are seeing everything in muted greys, tunnel vision, and covered in weird spots FOR NO REASON that can seen in the outside world. The only thing I can say is that it exactly as if someone doses you with terror and rage and a desperate urge to get to safety, and you have no idea they did it, and your feelings and behaviors don’t make any sense to the outside world – but to your body chemistry, you are doing the very right thing to stay alive.
 
For me, these dissociative episodes and uncontrollable emotions that can hit me out of nowhere were misdiagnosed with bipolar 2, as psychosis. That’s a very popular diagnosis that is wrong 52% of the time. Since I mostly have anxiety I was told I had atypical depression. Since the emotions could switch from terror to dissociation to rage to self hate to suicidal urges within half an hour I was told I had mixed mania and ultra-ultra rapid cycling. The fact that dumping enough antipsychotics down my throat to kill a buffalo wasn’t helping me was somehow my fault according to the doctors, and meant they just needed to add more to the daily drugging. I know people who probably do have bipolar – They race downtown naked smashing windows, take a taxi for 400 miles in a random pattern that makes sense only to them, and then are comatose in depression that saps every ounce of energy from their bodies. And they often respond well to the drugs, even though they make you fat and skakey and sleepy, but that’s sometimes better than faxing the president that Martians have told you that he is the antichrist and so you must kill him and being arrested.  (Jail is the last place anyone with a mental illness needs to be, but it’s a lot easier to get into than a good psych program.) The dopamine/acquire system seems to off kilter for these people, saying “Have sex with strangers! Spend $40,000 on red shoes!  Drive faster! Let’s go!” or just turning off the drive and – plop! - leaving them lying on the couch for six months. But a lot of people do not have bipolar; some have ADHD where the hypertalking and chronic sleeplessness and go-go driven feelings look like hypomania (that’s me as well). Some psychotic people are having flashbacks. And a lot of us with PTSD don’t know we ever experienced trauma. I mean, I wasn’t beaten every day. I only saw my friends kill one person. I only saw the guy who raped me beat one of his girlfriends unconscious. I only saw my friends stab or cut each other a few times. I was only locked in a house a few times unable to leave. I only heard about torturing people in drug deals occasionally. Not all my friends ODed and were left to die in dumpsters by my other friends. So why would I have PTSD?
 
I know now that my fight/flight/freeze system is not going to go away – and I don’t want it to anymore. It is protecting me. But through therapy where you develop self soothing skills (something I am sure my ex-husband and his macho WASPness would say was for the weak, since his parents weren’t very nice to his normal emotions of fear or anger, and so I should grin and bear the pain and solider on or else I am a very bad person), by developing self soothing skills, I can turn on the oxytocin and start repairing the damage that the drug addicts in Ithaca caused in the formation of my undeveloped young brain and nervous system. Most therapists want to teach me how to fight the anxiety which in my experience just makes it get worse, so I am now focusing on making friends with it. No banishing spells, no white light to block it. My anxiety is my friend and it loves me and we need to work as partners. And getting the oxytocin involved will stabilize things. 
 
I see this as a form of animism because I am working with the relationships of chemicals and neurons and evolution. It’s exciting. I still am worried about how much self hate I have about it, though. The bridges burned when I thought I was under attack, the abuse I put up with because I worried I was being paranoid, the jobs quit when I couldn’t find a way to make myself leave the house.  Those are the things that made me try to kill myself. My therapist and the books all say that it’s not my fault, it’s the abuse’s effect on my hormonal and neurological system, but no one else knows that and I feel humiliated.  When I try to explain I have PTSD and that’s why I am apologizing for some overreaction I had, people don’t understand and assume I am crazy or that I am weak or that I am making excuses or just don’t want to deal with it. I think that fear of more self hate, more shame is what makes me agoraphobic more than the actual PTSD. I am just tired of being hurt by what the PTSD acid trip makes me say and do. So if your son is coming back from combat duty or your girlfriend tells you she was gang raped when she was 16 and cannot leave the house, try to be tolerant, compassionate, and remember that’s not all they are, and it is not their fault. More shame and rejection is not going to make their anxiety less!
 
Now if you’ll excuse I am going to do a ritual to honor my oxytocin and make offerings to it, in hopes that this will start a relationship. I think I might do a ritual for my PTSD hyperaroused threat detection system, too, for loving me this much. It is not going to go away by me fighting it, so we need to have a better relationship. And animism is all about relationships.
 
(Stay tuned for my scientific theories about why shamanism works in traditional tribal cultures but not for Westerners.)