tackabery chronicle

Delirium, then the darkness

Today I had a physical therapy session, and during a breathing exercise I had a lot of trouble relaxing into my breath. Breathing - you know, that involuntary thing we do many times a minute - is not something that is easy for me to relax into. I have been trying meditation to get a handle on it, but I have knots on the knots in the muscles in my diaphragm. I know that this stems from my childhood night terrors: the terror of my father coming in to my room, and the terror of my parents fighting. In my child's mind, to avoid the former situation, I imagined that if I could pretend to be asleep, regulating my breathing and not making a single sound, my father wouldn't hear me and forget I was there. My room was the first door on the right just inside our apartment in the projects, and what I wanted more than anything was for him to keep on walking. I would screw my eyes shut, and try not to breathe. But he would creak into my bed anyway, his enormously large frame weighing down my mattress so that it scraped the floorboards.

To avoid the latter situation, I imagined that I had to stay awake, to bear witness. To perhaps prevent my father from hurting my mother, because the fighting between them scared me. My father's voice was deep and he was a large man with large, bearish hands (he called them his paws) and, at 6 feet 4 inches, an imposing physical presence and strength leftover from Marine Corps training. I don't know what I thought I would do, but I think I learned that if they knew I was listening, they would stop.

Enter insomnia, and paralysis of the diaphragm. This morning when I was having trouble, I managed to share something of the reason why I was having problems with my therapist, but as I was telling her about it, all I could think about was being locked in the closet. In the dark and the heat, with my terror, soaked in my own fear and urine. Later tonight, Richard and I went to see Delirium, Cirque du Soleil's latest musical show, which was weird and wonderful and moving, and the show relaxed me to the point where I was thinking of nothing but music, and motion, and the magic of people working together - the strength routines Cirque does are my favorite parts of their shows - when during one of the last numbers, I was suddenly back in that closet, four or five or six years old again, and the music and the community of artists on stage was far away, and I was separate from humanity again. I could feel an overwhelming urge to rock, and hyperventilate. The flashback was coming. I tried not to hold it back, but it came. I managed to tell my husband we had to go. The last number, an encore of the title song from Alegria - one of my favorites - began, but I was in the bathroom. Trying to catch my breath.

Technorati tag: ptsd flashbacks, cirque du soleil

posted by mktackabery @ 22:42