Guest Author - Michelle Taylor

You’ve read what PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is from the professional viewpoint. Now let me tell you how it feels from living in it.

When I was a freshman in college, and only 18 years old, I was a victim of date-rape. It was something that I partially blamed myself for at the time so never sought any help for it, legally or mentally. My main goal in life was to forget it. I didn’t do too badly at that in fact. I met my first husband only a few months later, dropped out of college to get married and completely escaped the place that had any physical reminders of what had happened to me.

I did pretty well for a while at not remembering. So good in fact that pieces of the “event” as I called it, were completely blank. This was perfectly fine with me. I didn’t want to think about what had happened anyway. I actually made it for 9 years without ever fully recalling my rape. Sure, I had a failed marriage under my belt, and I had some major hang-ups with sex, and I used food as a coping mechanism to the point that I had gained 100 pounds; but that wasn’t related at all to what had happened to me in college.

And then I happened to catch an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”.

I don’t remember much about the actual show that night (though I have become an avid fan since then). What I do remember is curling up on my bed shaking and letting out a moan so loud that my husband (the man I am married to now, that is) came running into the room. He found a woman curled into as small of a ball as I could get, crying hysterically. I had grabbed my pillow and would not let go. Thankfully my kids were visiting their dad that weekend.

After that I could not lock those memories back down; they started seeping out. The nightmares were the worst. They were every night, often more than once. Sleep became an enemy, not a peaceful end to the day. So my battle with insomnia began. I couldn’t tell which nights were worse; the ones when I didn’t sleep at all or the ones where I ran through a parking lot with burnt out cars but no people just waiting for the man that I knew was behind me to catch up.

I began having panic attacks in the grocery store and at church. I could not be around large groups of people. Soon I was staying in the house all the time. Not long after that I was staying in the bed all the time.

It was the day that I went to the grocery store and saw the man in the truck that I lost it.

I was just getting out of my car when a truck pulled in a couple of spaces down from me. It had Alabama tags on it. I watched this nice looking man get out of the truck and my left chest felt tight and painful. I wondered if this was what I heart attack felt like. He had dark hair and gorgeous blue eyes and he stood over 6 feet tall. It was when he put the cowboy hat on that I literally screamed, jumped back in my car and squealed out of the parking lot.

I don’t remember driving home. It is probably a miracle that I didn’t get a ticket or get into a wreck. By the time I got to the house I was sobbing. It was the weekend so my husband was home. Unfortunately the kids were there this time, too. He sent them downstairs to watch TV while he tried to calm me down. I eventually cried myself to sleep.

I still don’t know if that man actually looked like the guy who raped me in college, but it is more likely that I projected what I was afraid of onto him. I began work with a therapist soon afterwards to start pulling the real memories out of the nightmares so that I could deal with them and overcome them.

Now it is 5 years later. I still have nightmares occasionally, but they don’t have the feel of realness to them anymore. An occasional panic attack will happen, but I have coping skills that my therapist taught me to use to make it through one. There has not been a full-out flashback since that day in the parking lot.

Therapy is painful in the beginning. You have to pull out memories that you swore to yourself you would never revisit. But locking those memories away actually causes more harm than good – hard as it is to believe. I know; I’ve walked I those shoes.