I have decided to write my story/biography both as a sort of help for myself, as well as perhaps hopefully a help to others that live with PTSD. (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
I am in no way a professional, even though I do have a 2 year degree in psychology, which I studied mainly for my own benefit/reasons, since I could find no psychiatrist or doctor that could help me, or even comprehend what I go through on a daily basis, other than prescribe multiple medications, which only treat the symptoms but do nothing for the condition itself…
I live in Sweden and PTSD is still a relatively new diagnose over here. I am originally from the USA and from what I’ve understood; PTSD is more understood over there, being that it at first was mainly soldiers that were diagnosed with the condition and at the time called “Shell chock”. Sweden has not been to war in close to 200 years, so the condition shell chock has not been relevant until recently when Sweden has opened its boarders to many war refugees… (Which they have no clue how to deal with or help…)
It is first in the past 25 years or so, that psychiatry has accepted and broadened their view of PTSD to include us that have had to deal with/survive life threatening situations, as well as severe abuse.
Everything I write here is my own opinion and my own opinion and experiences dealing with “my” PTSD. I can in no way claim to know how others react to PTSD, even though I know that we share many common traits, regardless of the original trauma.
I personally have what is could be deemed as lifelong PTSD. Meaning that this is a condition that I will live with for the rest of my life, unlike many other psychiatric disorders/conditions that can with the right treatment get better over time, or even completely disappear.
If PTSD is not treated during the first 6 months to a year after the initial trauma, the likelihood of it becoming a permanent condition is very high… Yes, with time you learn to live with what I call “my PTSD demons” but they are always present and lurking just below my conscious mind and the smallest trigger/situation can send them raging throughout my whole being, creating the flight or fight response, as well as varying degrees of panic and or anxiety. This is something that can be very difficult at times, especially as people whom don’t have PTSD themselves, can’t tell by just looking at a person that they have PTSD. On the outside, we look like everyone else and depending on how long we have had this “condition”, have learned over the years to keep our emotions in check as best as we can… Strangely enough though, most of us that do have PTSD can single each other out in a crowd. Be it by body language, a fleeting meeting of the eyes or just watching those that stand by themselves on the outskirts of a crowd, silently watching those around them…Prepared at the slightest hint of trouble or drop of a shoe to hightail out of there… I call us “Fringe-dwellers”, meaning those of us whom live on the outer fringes of society. Not quite belonging in the mainstream of what is known as human society. More comfortable staying near the boarders and ready to take off into the safety of the shadows, which make up the boarders of “human society…”
My beginnings…
I was kidnapped from my biological mother when I was about 6 months old by my biological father, put on a plane and flown from California to live with my grandmother, which lived deep in the swamps outside of Tampa Florida in 1960. I spent the next 3,5 years living with only her, her husband and their young teenage mentally challenged daughter. During those years, I was confined/isolated and never allowed to meet or see any other people and was hidden away if anyone would approach the trailer we lived in. I was often severely beaten and constantly told that my mother was a good for nothing whore, that had tricked her son (my father) into getting her pregnant. How a 15 year old girl (my mother) which had a slight mental/learning disability, causing her to most of the time act like a 10 year old at most, could trick a 30 year old, highly intelligent man into getting her pregnant, is beyond my understanding, as well as both statutory rape and pedophile behavior in my book… Regardless, my grandpa on my mother’s side went after my biological father and gave him the choice to either marry my mother, or go to jail for statutory rape… He choose marriage…
Have many early as well as vivid memories of what it was like living with my Granny in the swamps. I would keep to myself and the only friends I had were the wild animals living in the swamps. I remember my Granny’s husband, how he would take me into their bedroom when Granny had gone to town and did unspeakable things to me. Things, I at the time thought were normal and his way of showing me love….
When I had disobeyed, I was punished by being lashed naked with his shaving strap from my neck all the way to my feet and then locked away in a tiny cabinet, which I couldn’t even turn around in. If I would cry, I would receive the same beating again but this time on the front side of me… I learned quickly to keep my mouth shut and not cry.
Have been told that I was a few weeks short of turning 4 years old when my Granny decided to leave her husband and took me and my aunt and hitchhiked cross country, from Florida to California, where her 2 grown sons from her previous marriage lived with their families. One of them being my father… That was the first time I meet other people and I remember being very scared of them and not knowing how to interact with the children, which were my cousins… A few weeks later my Granny’s husband managed to track his runaway wife and daughter down and showed up on their doorstep…
Next memory I have is him throwing me in the back of his big blue car and driving me to a strange house. He got out, walked to my side of the car, opened the door, dragged me out and pointed to the house telling me, ”your mother lives in that house”. He then without another word or look got back in his car and drove away, leaving me there standing on the curb, confused, scared and not knowing what to do. I remember sitting down on the curb, scared and being completely on my own for the first time in my life… Finally, I must have gotten up the courage to walk the path to the front door of the house, get up on my toes and reach for the doorbell… When the door opened there was a strange lady standing there looking down at me. She has told me later that the only thing I said was: ”Are you my mommy?” No tears, no emotions just a simple straightforward question… She brought me into the house… In a way, I am very thankful that she was home that day, as I have no idea what would have happened if she hadn’t been there.
Now in hindsight, perhaps it would have been better if she hadn’t been home, since no one had reported me missing, I would have most likely ended up in an orphanage and perhaps gotten the help I so desperately needed…
At first she was very happy to have me back, as she had no idea where I had been, even though she did have her suspicions that my father had taken me. She had no birth-certificate to prove I was hers and no financial means of getting herself to Florida to pick me up… Last time she had seen me, I had been out in the backyard laying on my blanket. She’d gone into the house to get my bottle and when she came back out, I was gone. She spent the next 6 months in the psychiatric ward and was released 2 weeks before she was due to give birth to my sister. Also a daughter of my father… I was also introduced to my baby brother, which was only about 6 months old. Even he was supposedly my father’s son…
I meet my biological father when I was 25 and asked him how the hell he could do what he did to me and why he didn’t take my sister and brother as well. He coldly told me that when I was born, he felt as if he had two children to take care of, me and my mother. But apparently he felt she was adult enough to have sex with… He also said that he did not believe that my sister or brother were his children, as every time he had tried to divorce my mother and turn in the paperwork for the divorce, she would get pregnant and claim he was the father, hence stopping the divorces…
My biological mother kept me for 3 weeks… She has told me that I was more like a wild animal than a 4 year old child and would call me a swamp bred wildcat… I would swear, cuss, fight and throw things at her, calling her all the names my Granny had called her. Lock myself in the bathroom and eat all the medication she had in her medicine cabinet. Constantly try to run away, as well as walk down the street and steel the neighbor’s mail and when she would try to punish me and lock me in my room, I would tear it to shreds. If she would try to hold me down, I would fight so hard I would pull my own arms out from the sockets in my shoulders. I would bite myself to the point of my arms being covered in deep and bloody bite marks, as well as pull whole fistfuls of hair out of my head, resulting in bald spots… (no sign of them now) When I met her again when I was 17, she told me that she couldn’t handle me and was afraid that if she would have kept me, she most likely would have killed me… She was also afraid that I would hurt my younger sister and brother…
Turned out that her sister, my aunt knew of an elderly Swedish couple which belonged to the same church they were members of, were searching for a girl to adopt… To make a long story short, they adopted me… and I went from the hot coals into the burning pit…
They knew nothing of what I had been through and thought my outbursts were merely temper tantrums… I have wished many times over the years that they would have taken me to a psychiatrist, as much would be different today if they had taken that approach to my behavior… But being overly old fashioned Seventh Day Adventists, they had the belief that their God could cure anything… I have many memories of their church Elders coming on a regular basis to our house and forcefully hold me down and pray/scream to their God to drive the Devil out of me. I remember screaming and crying in terror, not knowing what was going on. Only that they were hurting me and that they had my new parent’s permission to do this to me.
I remember when I was 5 years old and an old friend of my adopted parents was visiting, I remember her name was Karin Sjölander, she was on the chunky side, wore a bright blue dress with large colorful flowers all over it… As usual when we had company, I was dressed up in my best dress and was expected to sit quietly and show how well-mannered I was… After a while I was bored out of my mind and started playing with the chain on the lamp that sat on one of the side tables. I was told multiple times to stop but as a 5 year old, I forgot and would swat at the chain again and again…I remember her talking about her son, which had died in a motorcycle accident and that he would not be going to heaven since he was disobedient and wasn’t a Christian… I remember having to go to the bathroom and when I came back to the living room my adopted parents were gone and only their guest Karen was there. I asked her where my parents were and she told me, ”you have been so disobedient that they don’t want you anymore and have decided to leave you…” I ran for the door to try to catch up with them, but Karen was way to fast for me and blocked the door. I fought her with all my might and I can only imagine that my ”swamp bred wildcat” vocabulary must have shocked the living daylights out of this prude bitch… She ended up dragging me kicking and screaming to my room, where she beat the daylights out of me. Also told me that I was the most terrible and evil child she had ever met… She too had no idea of what my previous life had been like… Turns out later when my adopted parents came home again, they had planned this whole farce to try to scare me into obeying them… Did it work? No… It only taught me once and for all that people and especially grownups can’t be trusted. 5 years old I made a vow to myself to behave in any way or form they wanted me to, but the day I was old enough to take care of myself, I was leaving… Which I also did when I was 14 years old…
I remember receiving beatings nearly every evening before bedtime, for whatever transgressions I had committed during the day. It would start out as a game of sort, where she would chase me in order to catch me… Our house at the time was made out so that you could walk/run through the living-room, hallway, everyday dining-room, kitchen, nice dining-room and back to living-room… She would chase me round and round and we would even laugh as we would be running round and round, stop at corners and watch where the other person was, just to turn and run the other direction… Although when she would finally catch up with me, the laughter and fun was far gone… When my adopted father was home, I didn’t stand a chance as they would corner me from each direction… It was my job to go get the belt, or the green snake as I called it. Hid it once but then it’s ”friend” the brown snake took its place… She (my adopted mother) would also pick, or make me pick flexible willow switches and boil them in water, so they would become real soft and HOT. I would have to lay face down on my bed with my bottom bare and she would hit me as hard as she could with either the belt or the willow swatches. She would have me count out the times she hit me, 5, 10 or 20 lashes, depending on the severity of what I had done. Afterwards, she would sit on the side of my bed with the Bible in one hand and tell me how much it hurt her to have to punish me, but God had told her that this was something she needed to do, in order to make me into a good little girl…
It got to the point where I didn’t dare go to bed without first asking if I had been a good girl during the day, or if I deserved a spanking. For if I had gone to bed and she had forgotten to “spank” me, she would wake me for my punishment, telling me that if she had promised to punish me, I could always trust that she would keep her promise…
I remember the last time she beat me was when I was 11 years old. I lay there face down on my bed with my bare behind at her mercy, counting the 10 lashes, I for whatever reason had deserved. I didn’t cry and when she was finished and started in on her speech of how much it hurt her to have to punish me, I slowly sat up, looked her straight in the eyes and laughed at her. Stood up, pulled up my panties up over my sore rear end and proudly walked out of my room. Went out into the backyard to my playhouse and cried my heart out. She never hit me again. Instead, she changed her means of punishment into telling everyone we met that I was adopted and that they were doing the ”Lords” work by providing for one of the less fortunate… She kept that up until the day she died… Even at the end when she had become very ill and I had driven her to the hospital and the doctor came in, she introduced me as, ”This is our daughter which we have adopted”… Remember doctor giving me a strange look. I just looked back and shook my head with tears in my eyes… I told her many times how hurtful it was that she would always tell everyone that I was adopted and she told me that she didn’t want anyone to think that I was related to them, as I didn’t live up to their standards…
My adopted mother was furious the day I started searching for my biological family. (Why, I have never understood, since she clearly didn’t want me…) Screaming at me that I was ungrateful, that they had done so much for me, and that I would have been dead if they would have left me where I was, or even worse, ended up in an orphanage… I wish…. Went on screaming at me that they should have just left me where they found me, since I was no better than my biological mother…
I had always had contact with my grandparents and my aunt on my mother’s side and through them I managed to get in touch my biological mother when I was 14 and flew over to meet her and my siblings when I was 17. My biological mother showed me a letter that she had received from my adopted mother, where she demanded that my biological mother adopt me back, since I was a worthless, good for nothing piece of trash. I can honestly say now when I look back at my life at 52 years of age, having raised 2 children of my own… I didn’t do anything wrong. At least not while I was living under their roof… I never had any problems with the law, I never did drugs and I was a straight A student. My only fault was that I refused to belong to their church. Refused to pretend that everything was as rose-colored as they wished the world to believe their lives where… They even wrote me out of their will due to this but also told me that if I converted back to their church and ”behaved”, they would put me back in their will as sole beneficiary. I told them thank you but no thank you, there is no amount of money in this world that would make me even fake believing in their version of God…I asked my adopted mother once what she felt was most important here in life. How others viewed you, or how you felt about yourself and your life… She didn’t even stop to think, her answer was automatic… Most important is how others perceive you…
I remember sitting in the hospital alone at my adopted mother’s death bed, holding her hand as she drew her last breath. I remember crying my heart out for the mother I never had but had longed for, for so many years… When I left her hospital room after she had died, I left with my head held high; I felt that I had now paid my dues in full and that I no longer owed them anything…
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