The day the music wouldn't die
It just kept going until it gave me flashbacks and made me hate my life
Ten o’clock on Saturday night, I went to bed in my old room on the second story of Mom and Dad’s house in the South Sound.
As soon as my head hit the pillow, I heard it: a low, deep bass… joined by a constant, unrelenting beat, like the kind that comes from the car ahead of you at a red light and just annoys the crap out of everybody…
It was loud enough to keep me from falling asleep… and I was so tired, I needed my sleep… and whoever was playing their music this loudly obviously did not care about my needs!
Which only made me more angry, the longer it went on.
Every thirty seconds or so, it would fade, and I’d think it was over… but another ten seconds would go by and it’d start right back up again.
I lay there for a few minutes, trying to ignore the noise and just let my brain shut down and go to sleep already… and then I lay there for a few minutes more, angry at the sound and whoever thought it was okay to play their music that loud at ten o’clock at night…
And then I went downstairs and asked Mom and Dad to turn down the t.v. in the family room, thinking maybe it was coming from them. But the sound was still there when I went back to my room.
I knocked on my nephew’s bedroom door, thinking maybe he was playing a video game or something… but it wasn’t coming from him, either.
I went back downstairs and out the back door, onto my parent’s deck, and the sound got louder. I thought maybe it was coming from our neighbor’s house, and was about to yell at them to turn it down, but it sounded like it was coming from too far away to be the neighbors.
As I stood on my parent’s deck, listening to the sound, I started to think some group of irresponsible teenagers must’ve been throwing a house party. I started to get more and more agitated, the longer I stood out there. I couldn’t figure out why their next-door neighbors weren’t making them turn it down. I just kept getting more and more upset.
As my anger threatened to boil over and spill out onto my parents and my nephew (who were in no way responsible for preventing me from sleeping), I realized the sound was triggering a PTSD response, and if I couldn’t get away from it somehow, things were going to get really ugly.
I was about to lose my mind, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
For several minutes, the knowledge that I was being triggered infuriated me. I could hardly believe, after all the progress I’ve made in therapy, that such a thing was still possible.
I was livid when I realized this triggering event was pushing me all the way into flashbacks from my deployment.
It didn’t make sense that loud bass could have that powerful of an effect on me. But the longer it went on, the less control I had, and the more I started to feel powerless over my mental-emotional state.
It was like I could feel myself losing control… I knew it was happening and I knew I couldn’t prevent it… and that knowledge made me feel weak and afraid.
In the past, when I’ve had moments like this, I’ve always felt guilty somehow. It’s like I think it’s some kind of failure on my part, that makes me “not strong enough” to maintain control…
But the reality is we can’t control what will trigger us, or not. All we can do is try to successfully navigate the trigger response (hopefully, without harming ourselves or others…)
I was so mad, though! And so embarrassed, confused, and ashamed.
You see, I’ve been telling myself that all the progress I’m making in therapy is “taking away” all my trauma, and that the final result from all my hard work will be that all my trauma will be gone and the triggers will be taken away and I’ll always be in control and never be at the mercy of my PTSD ever again…
And that sounds so appealing but… Saturday reminded me that it’s just not true.
And I’m so angry, frustrated, tired, helpless, and overwhelmed. And when I get triggered (which is becoming less frequent though), I feel like, when is it all going to end?
When am I going to reach the point in my therapy when I no longer get triggered?
When I can fully let my guard down?
When I can stop waking up in the morning and having bad days, over and over and over again, with no hope in sight that my trauma will ever go away?
I feel like the answer to those questions is: it never fully goes away. And yet, it does get better. (It’s already getting better.)
When I used to get triggered, I always told myself it was my fault, and it was something I had brought upon myself, and I should be ashamed and embarrassed. I believed I had a responsibility to keep it a secret, to make sure nobody else ever knew how deeply I was affected.
On Saturday, I didn’t keep it a secret, though. I made myself tell my parents what was happening in my mind, and talk through the entire experience, and how it was making me feel. I pulled the curtain back and allowed them to see exactly how it was affecting me.
And I texted a couple of very close friends, and told them all about it, as well.
I let other people into my crazy, and I explained everything I was experiencing, so that they could understand (to the best of their ability) exactly what I was feeling.
I stopped believing that I had to carry the load completely alone… and I made room for other people to help me through.
And that was hard, and it was awkward and scary… but it was a hell of a lot better than keeping it all to myself and trying to pretend like I wasn’t bothered at all by the noise.
It was, dare I say, real progress.
P.S. It turns out, the noise was coming from an outdoor concert, roughly 5 miles away from my parent’s house, at the bottom of the valley, and it was fully permitted, authorized, etc… and it probably pissed off a lot more people than just me! But we didn’t know all that until late Sunday morning, after I had already suffered through all of Saturday night.
P.P.S. This Thursday, I’m publishing my first “Thursday edition” of the Success Comeback. My plans for the Thursday edition are to provide practical information and advice on how to live with severe trauma or PTSD, and still live a life of meaning and purpose. Keep an eye out for the first edition in your mailbox in just two days…