Mental Illness: The Demons Within

The next illness on the list is PTSD, also known as: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I wasn’t diagnosed with this until I was hospitalized on 5 North (the psychiatric ward of the hospital) but I believe it’s something I have had long before I was in the hospital.

I have been mentally and physically abused by people I trusted and who should have protected me and not hurt me. I will not use names or descriptions of all these people for my own reasons but again, if you know me you may know who I am referring to, however I will use the names of some.

Someone I trusted became very controlling and mentally abusive to me and my siblings, but physically abused me twice but did not physically abuse my siblings. He is no longer the person we knew due to a stroke, and some of that is what caused him to do the things he did but he still did a lot of things he shouldn’t have before had the stroke.

To this day I still have nightmares of him yelling, swearing, hurting me and threatening me and getting angry in general, even though I rarely see him. Even when I am awake, there are times where I hear stomping either for real or just in my head, and I immediately am afraid it’s him even though I know he isn’t there.

Another person who I believe contributed to this illness (and probably most of the others as well) is my biological father, Tim. He caused us a lot of damage but I seemed to be the one who was affected the most by him out of my siblings. I was also the last one to give up on him and want nothing to do with him.

When we were young, he would occasionally lock us out of the house while mom was at work and we would be forced to fend for ourselves and would go to neighbours' houses when we were hungry and/or needed to go to the bathroom.

Tim also threw a pile of books at me when he got mad at me for something and one time (long after my parents had been divorced) while visiting him at his trailer, as punishment, he put me on the top shelf of the closet in one of the rooms and left me there until mom came to get me and lied and told her I went up there myself (which would have been impossible, so naturally mom believed me and not him) and hit my sister with a brush.

He also had a black knife in his kitchen (which I had used for making sandwiches and found out many years later from my mom that it was a knife meant for drug use). When I was younger I told my mom about the black knife I used and she talked to Tim about it and made sure he kept the knife out of reach and also made sure he was not doing drugs while we were there. Whenever he played video games, he would get so angry that he would become violent and throw the controller at the television and would yell and swear and it scared me and my siblings as well.

When we stayed with Tim, he never had beds so we were forced to sleep on the floor or next to him. I remember waking up covered in maple bugs when I slept in the spare room and when I slept on the floor of his room, I remember seeing tons of beer bottles and cans under his bed.

Sometimes one of us would sleep on the couch but I didn’t like sleeping there because it was close to the door and windows and I didn’t like the trailer park he was in and was always afraid something might happen to me if I slept there. He was much better to my brother than he was to my sister and I and of course my brother was not okay with that.

We were also forced to pee on stuffed animals when he would lock us in the closet so we wouldn’t have to walk in pee. He also hit us with sticks if we misbehaved or talked back to him and would make us choose the stick and we would be in more trouble if we chose one that was smaller/thinner and would hurt less. He would hit us with the stick as if he were using a whip.

When we visited him we would be starving when mom came to get us so her and our stepdad would send us with bags of food so we would have something to eat. Tim would also find things on the ground and give them to me and my sister as gifts and very rarely bought us gifts for birthdays or Christmas.

He called once on my birthday to wish my brother happy birthday and talk to him and didn’t wish me happy birthday and mom was angry with him for doing that and my brother was also angry with him. I think that is the moment when my brother wanted nothing to do with him. My sister was the first who wanted nothing to do with him and I was the last.

Despite everything he did to us, he was still our dad and I still loved him and hoped he would change, that he loved us enough to change. I do not know if he ever loved us. I talked to him for a bit a couple years ago and he kept calling me little one and said he loved us but I don’t know if he was ever capable of loving anyone. I don’t think he knew how to be a father and I think he just saw my brother as a future drinking buddy rather than a son.

He didn’t know how to take care of us and when we stayed with him we basically had to take care of ourselves so at a very young age, we were forced to have responsibilities that children should not have. We had to grow up at a time when we should have still been kids.

My siblings have blocked out most of the events that happened with him but unfortunately I was unable to and it affected my mental health severely also because when my parents divorced, I blamed myself (I no longer blame myself though) and then when he left and moved to BC, I blamed myself and thought he was leaving because of me and it devastated me.

I know now I was not the reason he left and my brother and sister were not the reasons he left, he left because of himself because of his own issues and it had nothing to do with us.

During a brief conversation with him on messenger many years ago, he claimed that he left because he was a drug addict and that it was in the genes and if he stayed, we would become drug addicts too. My response to him was that if it was in the genes, we would be drug addicts whether he stayed or not and we were not drug addicts and still aren’t so it was most definitely not in our genes. I called him out on his lie. Whatever his true reason for leaving was, it had nothing to do with us. He is one of the major reasons I have many of the illnesses that I do.

A man named Jack who I used to work with, is another cause of this illness specifically (and also anxiety though I did not mention him in that chapter) he sexually assaulted me and my sister—but mostly me because I am very shy and a more submissive person and at the time did not stand up for myself and unfortunately made myself an easy target to him, whereas my sister is stronger and stands up for herself.

He made comments about our body parts and also touched us inappropriately and went through my wallet. My mom did not find out about what he did to us until we were shopping at Superstore and he walked by and said hi to me and my head instantly went down and I looked at the ground and my mom could see I was terrified and then she asked what was wrong and I told her.

Jack ended up being fired because of what he did and he was very angry about it, especially when my boss at the time (a woman) scolded him in front of me for what he had done, and made him apologize. Though my bosses intentions were good, because he was a very sexist man, for a woman to yell at him like that in front of a young girl, angered him so much and then being fired, sent him over the edge.

I was told he broke into the building we worked at and trashed the place and wrote things about me on the computers and was banned from there (I do not know for sure if that is true but it was what I was told by a worker).

For a while, he would wait outside the building for me with his dog so I would have to have someone come get me and walk me out of the building to their vehicle because I was terrified to leave by myself. He ended up in the psychiatric ward for a while and I saw him a couple times after that but haven’t seen him for quite a few years but because of what he did, I have many trust issues when it comes to men, especially men who look like him.

He was my first stalker but not my last. I was stalked briefly by two different security guards at a different job I had later on but those events ended quickly after talking to a co-worker who dealt with it for me.

Another cause of some of my PTSD but not caused intentionally or in a way that scared me, was the death of my grandpa. I was not as close to him as my sister but I still loved him (and still do of course) and while his death caused me pain, it was not entirely what had a very small part in my PTSD.

Something that also had a part was that he died a few days before my birthday and the viewing was on the day of my birthday it’s a memory I still have every year on that day and it makes it difficult because I always have that image.

I also occasionally have dreams of him and my grandma and the home they used to live in. I also had a dream where he told me he loved me and my brother just as much as my sister, because for the longest time, I thought that he didn’t. Though the part this event plays in my PTSD is very, very small, it does still cause me pain and sadness even today and therefore is worth mentioning.

I am not sure if this is a possible trigger of PTSD but my ex breaking up with me devastated me to the point where I cried hysterically every single day and was inconsolable and it affected my life and my work. No matter what, I could not go a single day without crying. My heart felt like it had been shattered to pieces and unable to be put together again. The pain I felt was unlike any pain I had felt before.

While we were together, my ex was good to me and kind and when he broke up with me he was kind about it and took me for a walk and talked to me about it and I will always love him and I won’t forget him but the breakup destroyed me and I think for me personally, it was traumatic and also contributed to my PTSD. He was my first love and my first real heartbreak and the only relationship I have ever had and it lasted for 6 months before he ended it.

I had gone from being a happy girl, who couldn’t stop smiling, who was in love and feeling like she was at the top of the world, to a girl who was broken, rarely smiled, still in love but alone, with that world she was once on top of, now crashing down around her. Love can change a person but so can a broken heart, and the broken heart is something I am still dealing with and is why I believe it belongs in this chapter (and probably other chapters as well).

Unlike the other men mentioned in this chapter, I have nothing against my ex and still think he is a wonderful, kind and gentle person who truly cared about me but was not ready for a relationship and has his own demons that he needs to battle by himself and maybe having me in his life made it difficult for him to fight those demons.

I wish him nothing but the best and hope he gets better and finds happiness and I will always love him and will never forget the way he was with me, the kindness he showed me and the way he looked at me.

Sometimes, the reason a loss hurts so much is because things were so good that when they end it’s too much to handle for some and for me it was. For that time, I was the happiest I can remember ever being and then that was taken away from me so quickly and so unexpectedly that it did traumatize me. That is why I decided to mention him here.

He will always have a place in my heart.