The following is excerpted from the speech I gave at the 2003 NAMI Washington Annual Conference. I debated for some time whether or not I should post this. It speaks of some difficult times for me, but it also speaks of the recovery I have made – and continue to make.
START SPEECH
My life changed in August of 1997.
That June, I was running a small and almost profitable Graphic Design studio. The Internet was just starting to take off and we were expanding our business from print design to web design. To make that step, I arranged a business trip to Los Angeles with my father.
It was on that trip when everything changed.
We had lived in the LA area when I was 5 years old and in Kindergarten. Dad wanted to see some of the old neighborhood so we went for a drive.
That was when I had my first flashback.
I didn’t know what it was then, but I knew I was going crazy. I was hearing things, seeing things, even tasting and smelling things. I knew none of it was real but it seemed real enough.
Over that first few weeks I had more flashbacks and started having nightmares. The more I had the more that came. I don’t remember much of those first few months except the terror I lived with each day. I was afraid to sleep, afraid to leave the house except to go to work – and the work I did manage to do suffered. I was afraid to tell anyone what was going on.
It was a few days before Christmas when I finally told someone I was having a nervous breakdown. We were in Spokane for the holidays and I was sharing a room with my nephews, which made it harder to hide the fact that I wasn’t sleeping. I was walking around the house late one morning when my sister Roni woke up, we talked for a while and somewhere in that conversation I told her a little about what was going on.
By then it was too late, things had gotten worse. By the time we got back to Seattle I just wanted to die. On January 3rd, 1998 a friend of mine convinced me to go the hospital instead of ending my life. My roommate drove me to Evergreen Hospital where I was shuffled around before being sent to the Psychiatric Ward at Overlake Hospital.
They gave me medication to help me sleep, and to treat the Depression that had set in. More importantly, they gave me a name for my illness.
I finally knew what to call this thing that had cost me my business, and almost ended my life.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Over the next year I ended up back in the hospital 3 more times to get me through one crisis or another. I also started seeing a therapist who specialized in treating Trauma Disorders. My family was very involved and supported me every step of the way, visiting me daily while I was in the hospital.
Over the last 7 years I struggled with my health, my finances, my career, and my relationships. It’s been a very long 7 years, but with the help of therapy and the support of my friends and family I reclaimed a large part of my life.
It has taken most of those 7 years to be able to say what happened to me without shame or guilt. I was sexually abused at school during my Kindergarten year.
Today, I still have the flashbacks, nightmares and anxiety. There are still times when I’m afraid to go to sleep, or even to go outside. Six months ago I had to withdraw from some classes at school because my symptoms worsened.
But I got through it, like I’ll get through each episode in the future.
Today, my therapy continues, and my family is still right here. I am active in NAMI Eastside, I will be graduating from Bellevue Community College in January, and I help my father coach my nephew’s soccer team. I am as active and as happy as I was before that trip to LA, something I never thought I would be able to say.
I’m also in a happy and healthy relationship with a wonderful woman.
Four years ago, she asked if I could build her a simple web page to help organize her list of Mental Health Resources. With her ideas, I started work on that small page. I’ve been working on it ever since. With the help of my girlfriend, my family and some friends that site has grown into the largest consumer owned and operated Mental Health site online, Mental Health Matters. That first site also led to the creation of other websites, including GetMentalHelp.com.
You can learn more about our websites by visiting us at our booth.
I want to thank my parents for all their support during this. My mom, Carol Bennick, is in the back of the room somewhere. My dad, Ron Bennick is speaking next.
END SPEECH
It amazes me that this is almost as difficult to read today as it was to read all those years ago. I suppose that’s the nature of PTSD though, it does get better, but it gets better at it’s own pace.
i don’t think you need medication for this at all. i think maybe you should make yourself get out into the world. of course this is hard but ask your family or friends for support. you could say i have social anxiety too, but i know i don’t need medication.
I think that depends on the person and the their situation. I say whatever works for you, go for it. If something isn’t working, then try something else and keep trying until you find something that does work.
Hi Sean, your story was saddening to me.
For anyone else suffering from a ‘Nervous Breakdown’ – the number one resource is a small and brilliant book that explains all the symptoms that lead to and then maintain a ‘nervous breakdown’. It’s called ‘Self-Help for your Nerves’ by Dr. Claire Weekes and can be picked up for a penny or a cent. In it, she explains the two types of nervous disorders – one with just the bewildering symptoms mainly due to stresses (akin to that of a burnout in a job a person may no longer desire to do), the other due to a problem; grief, guilt, shame, ect. Whichever it may be, the bewildering symptoms then take on a fearful life of their own. It was a bestselling book and is quite timeless. That every Dr in the western hemisphere doesn’t know about it is almost criminal. It was first published in 1962! Even the Victorians knew some of the core principles. The beauty of the book is that it then gives a quite brilliant and simple four step solution that resets the nervous baseline of the person suffering nervous breakdown/phobias/ocd, ect, ect. Any person that has ever suffered a breakdown or nervous disorder, should read it so that they can recognise that they weren’t going ‘crazy’ but suffering from common symptoms that were exaggerated by their sensitised andrenaline nerves.
The person gets their life back.
So, TOOL 1 is ‘Self-Help for Your Nerves’ by Dr. Claire Weeks.
But it will not resolve the buried traumatic incidents that came up to instigate the breakdown or sometimes the memories of the numerous times the person who had no other intrinsic problem, other than over-excited nerves, and no underlying motive- who now may have memories of phobic incidents.
The human mind, like the human body is designed, innately, to cure itself. You cut yourself and a scab forms and within a few weeks the scab falls off, having healed the cut and there is no sign of injury. Well, the human mind is designed in the same way. Had a bad day with lots of niggling incidents and a big one and a person goes home, has a deep restful sleep and wakes up fully refreshed and is on top of it. If, however, the sleep was interrupted and the REM sleep and the Delta waves missed out on, the incidents may have a traumatic trace memory. It might just be that a person or child wouldn’t have the life experience to make sense of the event in any case.
This is where EMDR comes into it’s own. EMDR will remove all major and minor traumas.
Traumas can be like a person getting small stone grit and debris in their shoes, at first they may not impede, but bit by bit they’ve been walking for years ignoring it, or simply buried it away as a forgotten memory and now the grit, has changed the way they walk, their gait, and their posture. In life, it’s their outlook on life. Or is can be sudden and over-welming. EMDR will remove the trauma, no matter how big or small with just the movement of a hand in front of the client and the wisdom of a clinician asking the appropriate questions. We are here talking about phobias, depression, anxiety, flashbacks, voices, hyper imagination and other PTSD effects, due to circumstances that can include war memories, terrorists attacks, physical violence, any sexual abuse, grief from breavement, disassociation, attachment disorders, divorce ect, ect. One to six sessions is all it usually takes.
How it works, well it seems to re-instigate the power of REM sleep (that was missing after the traumatic incident) – whilst asking the client to bring up the trauma/upsetting event and it starts processing to a healthy memory within seconds.
Here is a link to a book that covers in spellbinding detail and in lay person’s language how it works, the protocols for it and case histories. It’s one of the great books:
https://www.amazon.com/EMDR-Breakthrough-Movement-Therapy-Overcoming/dp/0465043011/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1502020247&sr=8-4&keywords=EMDR+Shapiro
You can also Youtube “EMDR” which has many interesting interviews, including with Helen Shapiro, the founder of it.
So TOOL 2 is EMDR
TOOL 3 is Havening: If you can’t get an EMDR practicioneer, this is quite brilliant off-shoot of EFT will put you right. EFT – which is a tapping of the face at supposed acupunture meridan points to reduce stress – it works but it usually works after the stressful feeling, thought or physical sensation has occured. It’s rather like bolting the barn door once the horse has bolted.
But Havening removes the phobias/depression/anxiety and other PTSD effects by calling up the memory and then distracting it whilst flooding the brain with a host of chemicals such as serotonin during Delta waves. And the person is back to who they were. It can be disorientating to lose all those horrid thoughts, feelings and actions linked to a phobia, nervous disorder, or PTSD. The only problem is that the person may be confused for a few hours or days by the sudden return to reality and normal thinking processes, without the sudden feelings of fear, anxiety, and apprehension. This will set you free and can be used before EMDR to give you stability and perspective. EMDR is still useful to get to specific memories and to lance them, with the pain of lancing. Maybe not a good metaphor. Havening works brilliantly if a person is stuff in a thought loop in EMDR. They are very complementary.
Here is Paul McKenna guiding those that need it, though it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C1liEFCZm4
Other techniques that can complement these are…
TOOL 4: Hypnosis, so that powerful inner states can be accessed and used to bring strength and stability and inner confidence, not to mention creating positive visualisations for the future. Anyone can do self-hypnosis. but it might be better done after or around the time of EMDR/Havening so that intrusive thoughts/feelings don’t interrupt.
TOOL 5: Time-Line Therapy Meta Meditation: In addition to mindfulness, meta meditation is known as loving-kindness meditation, which simply means focusing one’s mind on someone we love – then thinking of someone else we love and building that feeling up and then giving that feeling to oneself if we have a poor self-image/self-esteem or self-perception. Then moving that feeling to people we feel neutral about and finally that we may actually dislike, giving them compassion, forgiveness, kindness, Do it at night, before going to sleep but especially – if possible – by using a family album. This changes a person’s perception of who they are and reconnects them to their innate self. Giving love, forgiveness, compassion to images of oneself and others is incredibly liberating.
TOOL 5: Meditation – Mindfulness: All it means is focused attention. That may be a chant (“..Ooooommmmm”), attention on the out breath and in breath followed by a count, up to ten, or an object – such as a candle. Thoughts arise and the chattering mind (“monkey mind”) will interrupt with a thought, followed by another linked one and another. The idea is to catch the fact that one has started to “think” and to bring it back to the subject of attention, the chant, the breath, the object. Initially, the linked thoughts might in a train 12 or 15 thoughts before we catch the fact aren’t mediating and we bring back attention. Eventually, it gets short and short, a train 4 thoughts and we catch ourselves. Until the moment we are living the glorius present moment and everything seems vivid, rich and alive. It keeps you in the present moment, allowing a powerful sense of the present moment. The mindfulness of meditation not only allows the person to live in the present moment, reduce all measures of stress but also to be able to release and choose the thoughts that they want to entertain. It is different from the Timeline Meta Meditation, in that one is guided, whereas this ones is observational and about letting go the arising thought and going back to the focused point.
One thing that I would caution the person reading this is to get a clinician who deals with EMDR or Havening as a person with a phobia or fear may find that it is linked to a long forgotten traumatic memory and some flooding may occur. An experienced clinician can set up a ‘safe space’ for the client to be able to release the hurtful memories. Anyway, within seconds of the EMDR, the memory will be processed so that the sting is gone, all it is is a memory without emotional charge but now completely made sense and into context of by adult mind. The Havening technique uses an element of EMDR’s eye movement and has a different way for it to work it’s “magic”. And it seems to be able to defuse generic and specific anxiety. But if you are poor, live out in the sticks, or haven’t any clinicians in you country or state, then a person may study these methods by themselves or a support group and try them out. They will cure the issue, not manage it with drugs or just talk therapy.
Best regards Sam