Posted by ClearSkies on March 21, 2006, at 16:18:45
Wow. Who would have thought that a bureaucratic process could initiate a PTSD trigger. Yet this is what has happened with my efforts to renew my passport. Boring details are on the Politics board; although I am certain that my experiences could be echoed at many places around the world.
But I'd never experienced such an event-specific trigger before. It was so much more intense than the original events and so traumatizing.. I can't really give it enough credit. It is hard to be gentle with myself, to give myself enough room to feel and let this pass.
I have to remember that these triggers WILL PASS. I am not going through the original event again. I am not in the same personal damger I felt myself in previously. This is just an autonomous reaction in my head, a firefighting trait to protect myself against further damage.
Breathing slow doesn't help. Thinking about any other possible thing else doesn't help. Giving myself into the feelings at the moment is terrifying, it is nasty and sweaty and dirty. No amount of showering can make me clean from this experience, of being made to feel inferior based soley upon the city and province where I was born. I am not from a country with a history of civil war - vigourous unrest, to be sure; but nothing that can be attributed to this upheaval of burocratic red tape.
ClearSkies
poster:ClearSkies
thread:622977
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060312/msgs/622977.html