When I was growing up people were dying all around me. It was pretty obvious to me that children and adults at all ages were dying a lot in the 1950s so there was always much more fear in people than now bordering on paranoia. So, I grew up in a world where people were suffering and dying all the time around me. People often had no teeth left by 40 to 50 years old and wore dental plates because of this including my grandmother born in 1888. She passed away in 1978 when I was 30 years old in Seattle but had helped my parents raise me from birth to age 21 when I was in college when she returned to Seattle because she was too old for my parents to care for anymore. So, she lived until 90 in 1978. My mother's two older sisters cared for her until she passed away at 90. Both my mother's sisters and their mother and my mother all passed away at age 90 which I thought was interesting too. So, there is longevity in my mother's family as well as my father's family too.
My PTSD I think mostly came from whooping cough at age 2 and from Blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy caused by a blow to the head around age 9 years of age falling while rock climbing with my father in Chilao above Los Angeles in the Angeles National forest at around 7000 to 8000 feet or so.
I had seizures at night from this fall and didn't fully understand what had caused it until I was in my 50s and my son was studying to be a nurse. He said to me then that the ONLY kind of epilepsy one recovers from at age 15 like me is from blunt trauma epilepsy. The hereditary kind you don't ever recover from. I met a nurse who helped take care of my father in law that had the hereditary kind and she decided young to become a nurse but to never have children partly because she was one of 16 children in her family. So, though she was beautiful and always had boyfriends she decided to never marry or have children because she didn't want to pass on the epilepsy gene to one of her children.
For me, I was forbidden to speak of blunt trauma childhood epilepsy by my father to anyone. My first mistake when I was still young and naive was to tell Pacific telephone when I wanted to be a lineman that I had had seizures. That was the last time I told anyone this in regard to work or anything else after that. Because even though I have never had a seizure since 1963 any history of seizures could prevent all sorts of jobs and travel the way things were in the 1950s and 1960s. So, I realized my father was right. No one deserved to know I had had seizures once they stopped happening.
30 years later I finally told close family relatives and they didn't believe me at first because they couldn't believe my father would hide something like that from them. But, my father was valedictorian of his high school class and very wise and very smart and most people looked up to my father because he was a born leader. But, I couldn't compete with him because he was an extrovert and I wasn't.
I could be flamboyant, especially in the 1960s around women and women always loved me a lot which was both a good thing and a bad thing depending upon the context of my life then and now but life goes on always and what is good for one portion of your life isn't good when you are raising children and trying to stay married to raise your children right.
Anyway, I picked up this book:
Complex PTSD: from surviving to Thriving, I thought might be helpful to some of you so I'm sharing it here from my daughter's studies and PSU in Portland, Oregon.
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Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma: Walker, Pete: 8601420534247: Amazon.com: Books.
Buy Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A GUIDE AND MAP FOR RECOVERING FROM CHILDHOOD TRAUMA: Read Books Reviews - Amazon.
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