PTSD

                Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder:  Virtually any trauma, defined as an event that is life-threatening or that severely compromises the emotional well-being of an individual or causes intense fear or anxiety.

                For some people, life itself is the traumatic event, but there’s a really good case to be made that marriage can be as damaging as any other situation where the emotional well-being of individuals hangs in the balance.  People commit to living a life together through good and bad, but sometimes the bad bits are so damaging and overwhelming that recovery is nearly impossible.  Every day brings a new opportunity for the full frontal assault, or the unseen ambush, or the subtle psychological torture that husbands and wives unleash on each other.  Only people who know each other so well can know how to devastate each other to the very core.

                Some of the symptoms of PTSD are:  insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, and depression.  One of the most common ways people cope with PTSD is substance abuse (self-medicating), because they don’t know what else to do.  And of course, when that one glass of wine turns into four glasses and an Ambien, shit gets ugly.  A torrent of repressed animosity comes pouring out, and all the hurtful things get piled on. 

                I suppose the partners in any marriage take turns being the “right” or “wrong” one, but in a marriage gone sour, the wounds are so deep that all reactions tend to be defense mechanisms.  Rather to hurt than be hurt again, I suppose.  Or maybe our apathy and/or ambivalence just become a conditioned response to the ongoing battle.  Nothing gets left in the past – we subconsciously drag all our shitty feelings into the present, even though they should have been buried long ago. 

In a way, I wish I just had a terrible headache, but I don’t; I just have a soul ache, and I want it taken away, whatever the cost.  I have given up.  I have not been able to beat the forces opposing me, so I guess I should consider joining them.  I suppose if that means I will never again utter a cogent sentence, or think a sardonic thought, or trade banter with colleagues or friends, then so be it.  I guess it’s necessary to sacrifice everything that I have come to think of as me for the sake of my marriage and family unity.  Maybe that’s what marriage is:  the death of the personality.  I should have killed myself, as it were, years ago.  It’s like experiencing my own personal Jonestown. 

Sometimes being married feels like having a knife plunged into your back.  Slowly.  So slowly, in fact, that you only notice it one day when you feel a nagging, persistent pain in your back, or side, or head; and when you explore the source of the throbbing discomfort, you feel the hilt.  And then all the symptoms seem to fall in place, and you recognize that the actual stabbing happened a long time ago – it’s just the alarming amount of leaking blood that’s a recent discovery.  While that analogy might seem melodramatic, the pain that accompanies a failed relationship is just as real as any professional hit.  (Actually, that last part doesn’t work, because a professional would kill his or her mark fast and efficiently – it’s all of us amateurs making the death so painful.) Either way, it’s disconcerting and it sucks. 

Julianne Moore said it pretty well in the movie The Kids Are Alright:

“… the bottom line is marriage is hard. It’s really fuckin’ hard. It’s just two people slogging through the shit, year after year, getting older, changing — it’s a fucking marathon, okay? So sometimes, you know, you’re together so long you stop seeing the other person; you just see weird projections of your own junk. Instead of talking to each other, you go off the rails, and act grubby, and make stupid choices … And sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most, and I don’t know why.” 

Whoever wrote that movie gets it.   I don’t feel like there is any moral to this story or insight to be taken from it.  I don’t live in a slum in India.  My husband doesn’t beat me.  I am allowed to drive a car and wear what I want.  I am not a refugee in a civil war.  My house has not been razed by a tropical storm.  What do I have to complain about?  An unsatisfactory interpersonal relationship?  Fuck it, oh well.