A year ago.

My new shrink says I should process this trauma properly and she’s going to help me with that.

Yes, she called it trauma.

And I’ve been running away from the trauma by rushing through the process of recovery. She says I need to confront this trauma because it will be a cycle that will keep on bogging me down all the time. It’s the reason I couldn’t write and just stare at the ceiling when I get triggered. It’s like one step forward, two steps back. Just like when I discovered about him and that girl. I was back to zero.

She said alcohol is not the answer and medicating myself with alcohol to numb myself and make me fall asleep is dangerous because 1) it’s a depressant and 2) I have a history of alcoholism in the family.

Since August, when I hit rock-bottom, I’ve been under her care and gave me the right antidepressant and anti-anxiety meds. It has helped me so much because I’ve been in denial that I have trauma. Those months that I wasn’t sleeping… That I wake up every 30 mins. Then every hour. It was only when I had Covid that I felt I had really been sleeping, like I was making up for the months I hadn’t had any peaceful sleep.

I also get triggered by every little thing connected to him or that girl whom I started to hate. I have unfollowed her in all social media platforms even though we’re friends. You see, it’s just like a soldier with PTSD going nuts when he hears a loud bang, thinking it’s gunfire.

It doesn’t help that I carry the weight of the world as a single mom, during a global pandemic, and I’ve been carrying my entire team and all the stresses that came with it because of bad leadership. So I’ve been sweeping this trauma under the rug so I can juggle the stress at work and as a single parent. But all these three stressors compete all the time, hence, my bad stress management.

I just realized now that I am rushing my Covid recovery. Twin I and I biked from our apartment to UP this evening but we were just barely inside the campus when I got very dizzy and my vision became wavy. I thought I was going to collapse. I was hyperventilating. We stopped for a moment to steady myself and catch my breath and then we slowly made our way back home. I’m still weak.

I am not yet fine. I’m still sick. I still have long Covid symptoms. Right after a hot shower, I went straight to bed. Twin A checked on me and found me hot to touch like I have a fever. I still have a headache as I type this on my phone.

Why am I rushing my recovery? Because I’ve regained the weight I lost when I was really sick with Covid. I feel ugly that I am back to being fat. And upon deeper analysis, it’s because I’ve always thought that my being fat has contributed to the many reasons why he used and left me. He exploited my insecurity. And that’s the reason why he went after a journalist who was stick-thin and very young.

I need to be kinder to myself. It seems like I haven’t accepted the fact that I’ve been used; that every cell in my body is rejecting that thought but it is what it is. I have to accept that and I shouldn’t blame myself for what happened. There’s some kind of disconnect between what I’ve been trying to tell myself and what I am really feeling deep down. I have to work on that.

I need to work on my PTSD, if indeed this is PTSD.

(My old shrink–literally old–just diagnosed that I’m co-dependent that’s why I got stuck in an abusive marriage with someone with a narcissistic personality disorder but she refused to work on my annulment case. Now the Supreme Court ruled that psychological incapacity in annulment cases need not be medically certified by a psychiatrist and that term is just limited to the legal definition. So I dropped that old psych, good riddance. This new psych is for my therapy because I want to heal. And heal soon.)

According to the American Psychiatric Association, the symptoms of PTSD fall into four categories. Specific symptoms can vary in severity.

1. Intrusion: Intrusive thoughts such as repeated, involuntary memories; distressing dreams; or flashbacks of the traumatic event. Flashbacks may be so vivid that people feel they are re-living the traumatic experience or seeing it before their eyes.
2. Avoidance: Avoiding reminders of the traumatic event may include avoiding people, places, activities, objects and situations that may trigger distressing memories. People may try to avoid remembering or thinking about the traumatic event. They may resist talking about what happened or how they feel about it.
3. Alterations in cognition and mood: Inability to remember important aspects of the traumatic event, negative thoughts and feelings leading to ongoing and distorted beliefs about oneself or others (e.g., “I am bad,” “No one can be trusted”); distorted thoughts about the cause or consequences of the event leading to wrongly blaming self or other; ongoing fear, horror, anger, guilt or shame; much less interest in activities previously enjoyed; feeling detached or estranged from others; or being unable to exprience positive emotions (a void of happiness or satisfation).
4. Alterations in arousal and reactivity: Arousal and reactive symptoms may include being irritable and having angry outbursts; behaving recklessly or in a self-destructive way; being overly watchful of one’s surroundings in a suspecting way; being easily startled; or having problems concentrating or sleeping.