Post Traumatic Emotional Experience

Time is supposed to heal all wounds, but it doesn't. I don't think it heals anything at all. Physical wounds heal from natural processes and medical interventions. Emotional wounds never heal, they just get reinterpreted, accepted, synthesized into the greater emotional experience, or left to simmer, fester, or stay filed away until a new experience stirs the memory back into action.

I like to think I move beyond the hurts and deep emotional gashes I believe I can overcome. I want to believe I can make peace with my experiences. I'm not one to obsess over the long term. Obsessing is a painful thing I do when I am hypomanic.

My friend, Jolie, is recovering from a serious crash that in an instant had her body skittering across the road, abraded, bleeding, and with a serious blow to the head. Among other injuries, she sustained extensive damage to her pelvis and lower back, as well as a concussion. A brain bruise can have long-term consequences for anyone who sustains such an injury, but for those of us who are "differently wired," even mild head trauma can cause all things cranium to get bumped off an already precarious axis.

Jolie's mood has slid into a low, low place. Some of it may be situational, but some of it is likely a result of neurotransmitters that have started dancing without permission, as Jolie herself would say. Nobody really knows. The thing about this type of injury that takes people by surprise isn't only that it causes cognitive and vision problems, but it can greatly amplify the patient's irritability and the ability to speak tactfully. When the brain's doing its dance, the mouth is on its own.

Jolie and I have this in common. When we aren't doing very well, we stop trying to be polite, which is something we mostly do for other people's benefit anyway. Along with rampant apathy, there is a complete lack of energy to put toward polite social intercourse. At times like these, we'll tell you exactly what we're thinking, no holds barred.

We aren't bad people; we just become painfully honest. And that pain is felt by other people, not us.

Another thing that Jolie and I have in common is that we are actually both kind and generous people. We are diplomatic. We are charming, but direct. Unless we don;t feel well, and then we just say what we're actually thinking. From the time my bipolar disorder started building itself into a teetering stack of unmanageable symptoms, my propriety filter disengaged itself little by little until I just couldn't stop myself from saying exactly what I was thinking. People who knew me were offended by this. I was surprised by it, but later came to find out it's a very common symptom of an unstable bipolar sufferer.

For a long time, I thought those people were offended because of my words. Later, though, when they confronted me, I was shocked to learn that they were offended by the change in me. I was no longer fitting into the image with which they felt comfortable. My words, my moods, my demeanor made them uncomfortable simply because it was unfamiliar. they honestly believed my behavior was willful and completely within my control.

At that time, I needed support. I needed to know that my friends would ride this out with me, help me through it, love me when it wasn't easy, and soothe the raw parts of me that were stripped bare by my anger and resentment at whatever had caused me to have my affliction. I don;t care how many famous people have it and have gone on to have successful lives. I just knew I didn't want to have it, period, and I was upset that I could only hope to keep it at bay, but it would never be gone from my body.

Only two people stuck around. The rest ridiculed me to my face and criticized me for not being the me they liked. they were mad that I had changed. The fact that I was sick wasn't even on their list of issues to talk about.

that hurt. A lot. I cried for about a year, and then I got angry. Eventually, the more I thought about this, I became enraged, a hunched over, monosyllabic vessel for rage. I was always the helper, the listener, the friend in deed, and I had just gotten screwed so hard, I could not process it. What added insult to injury was when the same people tried to re-enter my life later, when I was closer to stability. I was stunned. It was like, now that the coast was clear, it was time to go back to knowing the May who didn't make them examine their own attitudes and behaviors. No, they didn't like her at all.

I wrote off everyone except the two who stayed true, and in the middle of everything, I met Jolie. She met me at my worst, but she understood that my edginess wasn't something that was intended to be a personal affront to anyone. I was just having an episode of a very unpleasant illness. She liked me anyway, and the feeling was, and remains, mutual.

Over time and with talk therapy and blogging, and medication adjustments, I learned to reframe my anger. I analyzed it into manageable chunks and filed it away when I thought it had served its purpose and run its course.

In the past week, Jolie has had to confront people whom she supported through their worst upheavals, only to find that the support wasn't even close to mutual. She told me that one of those people told her he liked her better "before." He said she wasn't as nice now, and that she had become unaccommodating of the other's needs. She was only focused on herself.

Hey, well, when you fly off a motorcycle and then in a helicopter shortly thereafter, there might not be a better time to be self-centered.

Like me, Jolie was disappointed in the mentality of her friends, and then her indignant outrage took over. I know how she feels. I have been there, immersed and drowning in it.

Shortly after Jolie recounted everything she was experiencing, my own anger came back. For days, I've felt it like new all over again. I find myself having mental confrontations with the people who betrayed me with their indifference. It has all resurfaced, although this time, I understand that it will do no good to try to "work it out" and explain what I needed at the time. This time, I am trying to feel what I feel, acknowledge that these are valid hurts, and just go with the course of emotion in the hope that it will subside more easily when influenced by my new insight.

Sometimes I am surprised at how visceral our emotional memory really is. As the Burmese would say, Very, very.