Not long ago, after getting a decent night of sleep, I woke up feeling exhausted. I told my friend that it was one of those mornings that if I could have gone back to sleep forever, I would. Everything just felt so heavy. It made me wonder—what the hell is wrong with me? I am in no way suicidal, and I genuinely love my life. I have goals and dreams. I love my children and want to give them the best possible life that I can. I am content with being single. So, what was wrong with me?
Then I started waking up having massive anxiety attacks. I woke up today feeling overwhelmingly anxious. That’s been happening a lot lately. I have nightmares or just weird and contorted dreams laden with fears that don’t exist in reality. Like last night, I dreamed I had to take a trip to a military base for a work trip of some kind. Most people in the dream were nice, but toward the end of the dream, some people were just incredibly unkind (I mean, I clapped back, but still). I also was stressed because I knew I hardly had enough money to make it back home. Then I woke up. What was that about?
I’ve recently been Googling symptoms of C-PTSD recovery because I know what it feels like to live with C-PTSD, and I know when and how it’s been triggered. I hadn’t woken up or walked around feeling gripped with anxiety and panic attacks since 2019. It was a staggering moment because I had not felt that way in such a long time, but it was so familiar. The tightness in my throat. The shortness of breath. The pinpricks of nerves. The rush of heat engulfing my body at a thought that brought of feelings of shame. Wait? Shame? I thought I’d become shameless. What was this about?
I sat still with it. I sat with the questions of “are there things that I haven’t taken accountability for”? Are there things that that I haven’t looked at? I reflected on the overwhelm and the meltdowns and the very embarrassing freak outs I had while I was being group and cyberstalked. Could I have handled it better? Yes. It would have been better if I hadn’t been drinking at all while that was going on, but I also know from Dr. Jessica Taylor’s Click. Stalk. Destroy. that is a very common and normal form of coping when someone is in the throes of that situation. Never mind that it’s also a very common thing for people with C-PTSD to do to cope with unfelt and unresolved trauma and to connect when they’re disconnected from their own feelings.
I sat with that, too. Are there unhealed traumas? Are there things I am ignoring? I did spend some time with my recently-past self, and I validated that what I experienced was very real and that I am not crazy. I greatly appreciate the litany of Instagrammers who have spoken out about their own experiences with gang stalkers and cyber bullies. I felt immense gratitude that I survived. I have seen so many stories of people who take their own lives because of predatory people. I sat with both the grief and anger at the reality that the goal of those predators was to either drive me crazy enough to end up in a psych ward (barely dodged that bullet) or to take my own life, which I refuse to do. No matter what. I may sometimes have only be hanging by a thread, but I refused to let go.
In 2019 when I was the most broken I’ve ever been, I made a conscious choice to stay alive because of how much I love my kids and how much I know it would hurt them if I ended my own life. I still love them that much, so even when I felt so incredibly broken these past couple of months, even when I felt so low-vibe and so bereft of drive or purposeless, I still held on.
I reminded myself of how alive I felt two years ago in the summer of 2024 when I was first really dialing into my purpose, when life was really getting back on track. Then I remembered the way being group stalked catapulted me back into a state of hypervigilance and fear, the same place I was in when Sean died, only it was much scarier for very different reasons. In a world where we have things like the Epstein class, who will literally kill people to protect their secrets and not give a single fuck about it, knowing I was being targeted by people of a similar entitled, authoritarian mindset was very disturbing. But I trusted the universe, and I learned to ground myself, so I knew that the this, whatever it was, was also something the universe was doing for my benefit because the universe is always working in our favor.
So, what was it? Then this morning, I did two things. One aspect was about C-PTSD recovery. As I said earlier—I am legitimately safe. Nothing is wrong in my life. I might be too hard on myself for things I’ve done that I know I could have done better, but nothing is that bad. So, if I’m safe, if I’m lovable, if I’m enough, things I remind myself of, why do I feel depressed and why am I having anxiety attacks? Where did the vibes go?
I mean, I’ve been sleeping better. My thoughts are organized. I realized one thing is that I don’t have any distractions anymore. I feel like I just ran a marathon, and I’m sitting in the car waiting for the energy to put the key in the ignition and drive, but I think I found the reason I’ve felt so stuck lately even though I’m finally in a safe place and no longer in a torpor of hypervigilance.
A normal part of C-PTSD recovery, apparently, aside from sleeping more, is to return to the baseline, you have to process through things again. Oh. That makes so much sense.
Then this Instagram video further explained a concept called a healing collapse. I recognized myself immediately. She said when you finally start healing, “instead of feeling better you start falling apart”. She said tiredness or crying are common. She also said “your old symptoms might come roaring back”. Yep. That would be this.
But it makes sense, too. Once I recognized the pattern, this morning, I felt better. Understanding has always been pivotal in my processing. In 2019, I had all of these feelings and symptoms in the aftermath of losing Sean. But that was because his illness and the hypervigilance required to be the caretaker of a person with cancer and the overwhelm of trying to keep the proverbial roof from caving in with everything we had going on, I was finally in a period of healing collapse. At the time, I didn’t have a word for it. I had no idea what was “wrong” with me, and unfortunately, when you are recovering from hypervigilance and C-PTSD, people who don’t get it (or who don’t want to get it) will treat you like you’re the problem. It really sucks.
But I understand now that’s what I was dealing with. I understand, too, that’s what’s happening now as I finally really fully recover from the effects of dating someone who was incredibly selfish and hurtful and being subsequently stalked and terrorized. I know that I am safe, and it’s okay that I have to physically tell myself that, just like I did in 2024.
That said, I am so tired of having my nervous system hijacked. I am so ready to come back to a place where I have an even baseline and where I am able to give my attention and focus to the things that are the most meaningful, where I can get back to being productive and back to building a life that I want to joyfully inhabit.
What I’d say to anyone who is struggling with long-term trauma exposure or trying to get their life on track, do it one day at a time. Be compassionate with yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself. And, you’re doing a great job.
The healthiest thing you can do for yourself if you’re in a situation where there’s long-term and repeated trauma exposure is to get out of it. That means going through it or going through with it. I spent a long time working on myself and healing after Sean died. I delayed my healing by dating someone who triggered old childhood wounds that I would go on to heal properly using meditation and reparenting. But once I realized that relationship was essentially over and that I would be better off—as would my kids—without someone in our life who constantly attempted to leverage shame and guilt to keep me stuck in negative emotions, once I learned how to talk lovingly to myself and totally reframe my mindset, I was able to remove that person from my life. Getting away from things and people that drain your energy is pivotal for healing. You can only heal so far when you are trapped in adversity.
After that person left my life (or so I thought) in the summer of 2024, through writing essays and engaging narrative therapy to work through the things I was healing, my recovery accelerated. I was in a really good place by the end of that summer when chaos ensued. I have joked without a shred of irony that the last two years have felt like a mashup of Jim Carrey movies—The Mask (and the narcissists who wear them) meets Liar Liar (my ex) meets Dumb and Dumber (the people who participate in group stalking) meets Ace Ventura Pet Detective (me, in calamitous chaos doing whatever was necessary to figure it all out) meets The Truman Show (being constantly surveilled). It was surreal. And while my mindset and the way I (thankfully) have learned to understand the world and reality through quantum energies helped me survive mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, the trauma was real, and as optimistic and loving as I choose to be, that tax always has to get paid. So, I’m paying it.
But I know this is temporary. I’ve recovered from everything I’ve had to deal with and in doing so, I’ve been able to find the light and beauty in it. I’ve chosen gratitude. I feel like I have so many stories that I can and will write about that experience as a way to help other people avoid ever having to deal with people like that ever.
That said, I’m going to continue being patient with myself and continue doing the work, so that I can see that people are genuinely good and they’re all out there just trying to make the world a better place. I think that the people who do hurtful things are just acting out of their own hurt and self-inflicted victimhood rather than choosing the route of empathy, to feel through their own pain while committing to never inflict that on someone else. I truly believe what we do with our pain is a choice. You can let it devour you and your soul, or you can use it to empower yourself and to set your soul on fire, so you can be a light in someone else’s darkness. I think you know what I choose. Lumos.
