Self-Calming after PTSD dreams
PTSD dreams are very different than normal dreams. You feel as though you are really experiencing the events - you not only see and hear, but you have the sensation of touch, pain, smell, taste. This dream involved, as many of them do, my abusive ex-husband. Sometimes they are recreations of the actual past traumas - sometimes they have pieces of that, with other components. This one involved me being on a bus with the ex, and him starting to beat a fellow passenger. I tried to stop it, but I wasn't strong enough to pull him off of the guy. So I alerted the bus driver hey, this is happening, you need to call the police, this guy is a dangerous criminal and he's hurting people.
The driver pulls over and the police are there, and we're somehow in the town my ex grew up in, in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The cops there recognize him, and are telling him they remember all the bad things he did in their town so they aren't surprised he's come to this. The ex takes me hostage,and tells me how this is all my fault - he has schizophrenia and he can't help what he does and don't I have any sympathy for him? He produces a small pocket knife saying he will make me see, and begins to carve up my eye. I can feel the knife slip in, the sharp stabbing pain, smell the blood running down my face and taste it as it drips into my mouth.
And then I wake up, and I'm unsure for a bit where I am and what is going on. My body is shaking, my heart is racing, I'm in a cold sweat. There is residual pain in my eye , and I feel it to make sure it is still there. No blood, no blood on my face or in my mouth. A concerned cat is sniffing me. I'm at home, I'm safe here. I start to do the breathing exercises and tapping I've learned in EMDR to calm down enough to go back to sleep.
When I wake up again, I think of what might have caused the PTSD to rear its ugly head. When I'd gone to bed the night before, I was agitated. I'd spent some time in the evening at the library, working on my genealogy research. I was surrounded on all sides at the computers by a family - four children and a mother. The children seemed genetically incapable of sitting still, and the mother was more interested in checking her facebook and messaging friends than disciplining them. So much unpredictable movement,and so much noise surrounding me on all sides wasn't going to end well. But I was making progress on my research and really wanted to continue. I tried to ride it out, figuring the mother would eventually do something or the family would leave. But the children just got more squirmy and loud the more that they saw they were getting away with it and finally I had to give up in disgust.
When I got home I tried to calm myself and play some games, but I was still really irritable and overstimulated. Hyperaware of every sound and movement. These are all warning signs that I am approaching either a sensory meltdown (thanks Asperger's) or ptsd incident (flashback, dream, anxiety attack). I had a bit of a hard time falling asleep, and then I had the dreams. Now today I am doing what I can to return my nervous system to normal. First step is to confront the dreams head on instead of repressing them. When I am fully aware, I go over what happened in them. Which things really happened (taking a trip with my ex to his hometown really happened, though the point at which he held me against my will was much later, and we didn't find out he had schizophrenia until many,many years later) and which things did not really happen (the bus incident, eyeball carving). As I review, I pay attention to my body's signals- when I start to tense up, I stop and relax my muscles. When I am breathing rapid and shallow, I do mindful breathing. I type out what happened, and read through it, this time tapping my arms and keeping my breathing steady.
I read through until it doesn't bother me to read about it, then feeling I have successfully processed the incident, move on to do other things - something calm and pleasant. When I am finished with this post, for example, I will find my tv remote and turn on a nice nature documentary and play a game on my kindle while I watch it.
The driver pulls over and the police are there, and we're somehow in the town my ex grew up in, in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The cops there recognize him, and are telling him they remember all the bad things he did in their town so they aren't surprised he's come to this. The ex takes me hostage,and tells me how this is all my fault - he has schizophrenia and he can't help what he does and don't I have any sympathy for him? He produces a small pocket knife saying he will make me see, and begins to carve up my eye. I can feel the knife slip in, the sharp stabbing pain, smell the blood running down my face and taste it as it drips into my mouth.
And then I wake up, and I'm unsure for a bit where I am and what is going on. My body is shaking, my heart is racing, I'm in a cold sweat. There is residual pain in my eye , and I feel it to make sure it is still there. No blood, no blood on my face or in my mouth. A concerned cat is sniffing me. I'm at home, I'm safe here. I start to do the breathing exercises and tapping I've learned in EMDR to calm down enough to go back to sleep.
When I wake up again, I think of what might have caused the PTSD to rear its ugly head. When I'd gone to bed the night before, I was agitated. I'd spent some time in the evening at the library, working on my genealogy research. I was surrounded on all sides at the computers by a family - four children and a mother. The children seemed genetically incapable of sitting still, and the mother was more interested in checking her facebook and messaging friends than disciplining them. So much unpredictable movement,and so much noise surrounding me on all sides wasn't going to end well. But I was making progress on my research and really wanted to continue. I tried to ride it out, figuring the mother would eventually do something or the family would leave. But the children just got more squirmy and loud the more that they saw they were getting away with it and finally I had to give up in disgust.
When I got home I tried to calm myself and play some games, but I was still really irritable and overstimulated. Hyperaware of every sound and movement. These are all warning signs that I am approaching either a sensory meltdown (thanks Asperger's) or ptsd incident (flashback, dream, anxiety attack). I had a bit of a hard time falling asleep, and then I had the dreams. Now today I am doing what I can to return my nervous system to normal. First step is to confront the dreams head on instead of repressing them. When I am fully aware, I go over what happened in them. Which things really happened (taking a trip with my ex to his hometown really happened, though the point at which he held me against my will was much later, and we didn't find out he had schizophrenia until many,many years later) and which things did not really happen (the bus incident, eyeball carving). As I review, I pay attention to my body's signals- when I start to tense up, I stop and relax my muscles. When I am breathing rapid and shallow, I do mindful breathing. I type out what happened, and read through it, this time tapping my arms and keeping my breathing steady.
I read through until it doesn't bother me to read about it, then feeling I have successfully processed the incident, move on to do other things - something calm and pleasant. When I am finished with this post, for example, I will find my tv remote and turn on a nice nature documentary and play a game on my kindle while I watch it.