I knew when I was in high school that I was a bit odd.  When I complained to my dad he reassured me I was like every other teenager.  Well, I talked to my friends and I kept feeling that there was something wrong with me.  I passed out in high school, my friends didn’t.  I could stay up all night at a slumber party, I was awake alone.  I reacted differently; I didn’t understand my peers.  When I went to the doctor I tried to explain but I was blown off as just another overreacting teenager.  By the time I was in high school, all my memories were gone.  I could barely remember a year or two before, nothing of my childhood.  It was already but a distant impression of….I wasn’t even sure.  I started looking for answers I did ask my parents, doctors, I took a Search for Identity class, I read books like Bellevue a State of mind and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.  I didn’t expect to find help in a book called SHE from Pigpen to paradise….but sadly even that left me with more questions than answers.  After hundreds of dollars in medical test, blood tests, MRI, glucose tolerance tests and eventually Burrow’s Neurological hospital for epilepsy test.  I gave up.  Medical doctors had no answers for me.  When our children started getting married and moving out….I felt I needed to work on my marriage.  We attended a marriage class for 6 weeks.  Each week I felt more confused and distressed.  I couldn’t participate in the conversations because I didn’t understand what they were talking about.  Things like boundaries, feelings, connections, and a bunch of other stuff that made no sense.  About this time online I stumbled onto Flylady.  I signed up in another desperate bid to learn to clean my house.  (Still failed but I learned some cool stuff.)

Flylady.net traipsed into my email and started teaching me about the evils of perfectionism keeping me frozen from really being who I was capable of being.  Here is a link….

http://www.flylady.net/d/br/2015/08/05/our-perfectionism-hurts-others-4/

http://www.flylady.net/d/br/2015/01/31/back-to-basics-musing-perfectionism/

I certainly didn’t plan to learn a basic truth from a lady that tells me how to clean my house.  I still struggle with a messy house but the stuff on perfectionism and what it did to hurt myself was amazing.  Flylady became a topic of discussion with my counselor on more than one occasion. Learning about perfectionism from Flylady was another step in the direction towards healthy.

This is why I encourage people to look at all different possibilities.  All sorts of things can influence.  The music I listen too, does it help me feel happier and more at peace or do I want to rip the radio control knob off?  I changed what I listen to.  I am partially deaf and need to use hearing aides so I didn’t think what I listened to would make a difference since I couldn’t understand the words anyway.  Then I learned that the music itself affected me.  I changed to what I like.  Cast in Bronze is at the top of my list.  http://castinbronze.com/  How do you feel after listening to a certain type of music for a half an hour.  Do you feel more energized or more tired?  Does it start to sound like fingernails on the chalkboard?

TV shows I watch, do I feel more upset or calmer?  Do I feel connected in someway to the characters?  Yes, I understand that these people are fictional but I do feel a connection and realize someone else sometimes looks at the world like I do.

Blogs that I visit do I feel encouraged?  Comments on my blog, do they add another opinion or are they spewing their negativity?

Facebook….I remember a lady posting how she hated facebook for all the negativity.  I jokingly suggested she needed new friends.  I also share with other people the delight of “hide this post” and “I don’t want to see things like this.”  I am Facebooks commodity.  Their pitch is that XXXXXXX number of people will see their advertisement.  Facebook needs me to stay online so they will cater to my taste.  The more I click like the more I get what I like.  Facebook sometimes is annoying but my friends are on their and my kids and photographs I enjoy and funny videos and don’t forget MINIONS.  Yes, I have a minion doll and a t-shirt.

Part of living with PTSD is changing your environment to one that helps with coping.  I am still working on creating a haven that I call home.  I like one of the memes I read that said, “Home isn’t a place it is a feeling.”