C-PTSD: What it means to weep with those who weep.

I woke up crying in the middle of the night again.

This was happening nearly every night. There were no dreams I could remember, no obvious stress beyond typical life things, or so I thought. I was struggling in a church friendship and something about that was just starting to get weird. But at this point, the crying seemed arbitrary. I had no explanation for it and I had never heard of such a thing. It was starting to scare me.

Soon after that, I started crying in my car. Not at a sad song or because I had a sad experience. I was just crying. Then, it happened whenever I was alone. Pretty soon it was happening all the time and I was struggling to conceal it. I would have to hide in bathrooms at work, church, and even from my roommates at home. My friend thought it might be depression. I could understand that, given how I was feeling at the time, but something about the various diagnostic lists I read just wasn’t quite right. Depression fit how I was moving through life, with a persistently cloudy, heavy-headed feeling. But it didn’t account for everything else. I had nervous energy underneath the cloud. I was scared of things and people in a way I never had been before. I couldn’t cope with normal life and normal disappointments. I had no idea what was happening to me.

I asked for help. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?

Diagnosis

Several excruciating months later, I would hear the word trauma applied to me for the first time by a knowledgeable and trusted friend. I would be told what emotion dysregulation was and that I was suffering from it. I would face a dark truth about 14 years of my life (that I will not be articulating here) and come to understand that the uncontrolled crying that woke me up in the middle of the night was caused by a repeated brain injury. I was diagnosed with C-PTSD: Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had never heard of it. 

For 14 years, starting at the age of 17, something happened to me repeatedly that hurt me. My brain and body went into survival mode for a long time. One doctor I spoke with said that my autonomic nervous system had likely been overactive from the beginning, with damage done to my limbic system, my memory and metabolism, and my endocrine and immune systems. I came to understand that trauma is a physiological disease. I’d had no idea. It would take me several more years to start telling close friends.

If you had told me in the months before that I was a trauma victim, I would have told you no I’m not. I would have meant it. I would have been scared or confused if you had insisted I was. I would have called you crazy and never spoken to you again. I simply could not see it as real. It was too much, too grievous, too overwhelming for my mind to allow it to be real. Now, don’t go too far with this idea because what happened to me is not some recovered memory. It’s a crime. I reported it to the police. There are other victims of the same person. I did not make it up. Even the state of Texas called it a crime. It happened. I know it was real.

Nevertheless, when the weeping first started in the middle of the night, I can honestly say it never occurred to me that I was a victim of severe trauma.

The Unveiling

I went to a lot of people for help when it started, with mixed results. Some people were safe though often as confused by my issues as I was. They kept me company through lingering darkness anyway. It was critical care but none of us really knew that at the time. Had they written me off as needy or weird or undeserving of support, I can’t say what would have become of me. I don’t like to think about it.

Why didn’t I know why I was weeping? Some of you will already know the answer. In the midst of ongoing trauma, your brain protects you. That can mean avoidance, dissociation, self-medication, all sorts of clever (and often harmful) processes the brain cooks up to allow you to keep living, despite what is happening to you. Minimize, rationalize, and deny, so you can keep breathing. The brain is amazing. When this happens to an adolescent, the symptoms are more pronounced. The younger you are, the less developed your brain is, and the longer the trauma continues, the more damage you accumulate though it isn’t always so. The truth of my hurt was elusive thanks to this trauma response. I’d also been conditioned to minimize and rationalize it by the person. The confusion is layered and profound. The truth feels like a name you can’t recall but you think that you might remember it any second now. You see it in your peripheral vision, flitting by, but you can’t ever look at it. Then, one day, it’s over and things can seem unremarkable and unchanged for a while. You forget all of it. In your immediate self-awareness, it never happen.

The weeping started about 6 months after the trauma had finally stopped. There were always symptoms present in my life if one knew what to look for; I can see them now, looking back. But the loudest and most disruptive symptoms only started once I had found some level of safety. I’ve been told it’s often like that. From my perspective, so distant from the last unacknowledged assault, my weeping seemed both arbitrary and inexplicable. To inexperienced observers, it might appear ridiculous. To the right mental health professional, it was an obvious red flag. I was fortunate to have someone make the right referral in the nick of time. I was fortunate to have a few safe people. Sadly, I was about to be reinjured by someone else, and right at the same time I was getting my diagnosis, finally starting to learn what was wrong with me.

With Friends Like These

I said I asked for help from some safe people. Unfortunately, I asked some unsafe people too and one of them was my pastor.

Back then, my pastor was a young, impatient man, filled with his own ambitions and anxieties that I could not see at the time. I didn’t know him personally but I trusted him; I had no reason not to trust him. He’d been my pastor for 10 years, though I’d never come to him for counseling before that year. (Avoidance, which in this case was not a bad thing.) He made a lot of mistakes with me and others back then that were a product of his age and privileged life experiences. But there were other things he did that could not be explained away as mere youthful errors in judgment. After a season where I slowly realized he was inappropriately abusing his power, I became, in the words of one elder, “collateral damage”. Wrong place, wrong time, associating with the wrong people. The pastor called me “attention-seeking” and worse, to my face and to others. He lied about what he said and several things he’d done.

I had no clue what was really happening for months, as his actions were increasing my own distress and symptoms. Thankfully, I had just enough support built up outside the church by then to survive it. I stayed at the church, despite what happened, rationalizing the worst of it and naively hoping reconciliation might come one day. (Reenactment, and it was not a good thing.) I wanted to trust him. That’s another symptom that opens up trauma victims to reinjury. Your trust was betrayed once by people you thought were safe. You can spend the rest of your life longing for real relational safety. If you show that longing to someone who wants to harm you, they can use it. My pastor would pretend he was safe. He was not safe.

To make a long, messy story short, we added institutional and spiritual trauma to my treatment plan. They were harder to process while I was still at the church. That was hard on my heart in ways I don’t have space to explain. But I was so reluctant to lose hope, that I didn’t leave until 7 years later. The pastor and I never reconciled, though I tried multiple times. Each time I was warned that he would not listen. Therapists and prophets know things, y’all. He did not listen, not even when I told him about my trauma five years later. That was a mistake and not a story for today.

Weep With Me

The first time I went through EMDR treatment I saw something I didn’t expect. It wasn’t a flashback and it wasn’t a vision. EMDR doesn’t work that way, at least not if it is done properly. As one trauma specialist I know likes to say, “We are on a train; we can look out the windows, but we do not get off the train.” The goal is not to drop you back into some seriously dark memories and activate your trauma response until you start shaking uncontrollably. If you see something or think of someone, it is more like remembering vivid portions of a dream, something that may be real, or simply help reveal something about your trauma experience you couldn’t see before.

That first time, I saw was myself. I was 17 and unhurt. Those details popped into my mind immediately and it makes sense for a first session. I saw the version of myself before the trauma changed the trajectory of my life. She was okay. She was happy. I did not see some present threat or sadness, some recent pain or struggle. Two decades later, and the first thing I saw was me, safe and well and happy. Apparently, I still needed to grieve for her, for what was lost. I wept. This time, I knew why.

It is not a complex thing Paul asks when he says to weep with those who weep. It means to do as my safe people did, to keep someone company in the darkness, not to become broken like them. That wouldn’t help either person. It’s just to be present, to not leave someone alone with sorrow. Be careful of making yourself the judge of someone else’s tears.

Pastors, in light of James 3…

Pastor, teacher, and leader: Were my tears “biblical”? Did I have a right to them if I didn’t know why they were falling? How could you have known that? Do I have a right to the ones that fall now, in grief and memory for the girl I was? For the life that she might have led? Or am I still just seeking attention?

Please. I beg you. Stop torturing words like empathy. Just sit with people. That’s all Paul is asking you to do. If you can’t do that, if you are impatient with people’s suffering, then do something about it.