What The Wounds Taught Me

***Trigger warning*** This story contains a personal story about suicide and PTSD. Please seek help if you are struggling.

Five years ago, I was diagnosed with PTSD. Facebook memories reminded me of this today. I thought it would be helpful to share my story, experience and what helped me to heal and become the person that I am today. It looks different for everyone, so please note this is a personal story, not medical advice. If you find something that may be helpful, please use it.

This piece is a part of my healing journey and I share it with any of you who may be struggling, or know someone who is.

Feel free to share this with them as well if you feel it may be of benefit.

My PTSD diagnosis came from an unfortunate, traumatic experience at work, and in full transparency, I was sexually assaulted (SA) by a client. I wasn’t the only one, but the way it impacted me, was different than it impacted others. That’s the thing with trauma, it’s an internalized event, and we all experience it differently, which is one of the reasons it doesn’t do any good to try and compare our trauma with others. My counsellor suggested it may be Complex PTSD, better known as CPTSD, as it was the second time in my life that something like that had happened to me.

I don’t remember the date, but every November my body reacts. I am more jumpy (to the point where I crouch down when I am walking and someone comes up from behind), hyperaware and vigilant. I assume the SA took place sometime in that month. To be honest, at the time, I didn’t even recognize the situation for what it was. Often times we think SA or any type of assault has to be brutal, and the way we identify “sexual” in nature looks different to each of us. It wasn’t until someone called it out and named my experience that everything shifted, and my healing journey began. But let’s back it up a bit for some context, without going into detail of the assault.

I functioned for a year, if not a little more, on autopilot. I want to preface that my place of employment was quite awful for staff morale and support. They cared more about the clients that we served, and prioritized that over staff safety and wellbeing. Many of us struggled, but that is their story to share and I won’t do that here. During my own autopilot, I was asked to facilitate a talking circle due to me bringing concerns forward about staff’s wellbeing. I was as manager for a program during that time, but I cared about all the staff, not just my own. So I felt it was my duty to take this information to my upper management and find a way to more forward as we could no longer go on the way we were.

I was directed to let them talk, but they couldn’t focus on the negatives or get caught in a “bitch” cycle or whatever the word was that they used. When I entered the room, I let staff be real and vulnerable. For far too long we were all stuck in silence and I wasn’t prepared to create the same type of environment our upper management had.

The following day I was asked how it went. I told them that most of us were medicated and did not feel supported, among many other things that has now slipped my mind. As I walked down the hallway with my manager engaging in this conversation, she said to me”everyone in this field is medicated…”what are they doing to take care of themselves?”. This wasn’t acceptable to me, but I felt like I was at a loss… is this the best we could do? I replied and said that I was the poster child for self-care. I was sleeping enough hours, working out regularly, and still struggling. They basically shrugged their shoulders and carried on.

There was another client at my work who would call from custody and ask to speak with me. The one day he called and I was called to the front of the office to take the call. I asked him how he was doing and when he was getting out, so we could make a plan for his return to community and I could help him get connected to supports so he was not released into homelessness. That is something I would do for anyone that I worked with.

During this phone call, he tells me that we are going to be together, and he was quite adamant. I ended the call shortly after because despite me telling him that was inappropriate and would not happen, he was not taking no for an answer. On top of me already feeling unsafe because of the SA, this made me feel 10X worse. I went to find management to share my concerns. I was met with “these are the people we serve”. I took it into my own hands to communicate with the jail to have my number blocked so he could no longer call me directly, and I made a plan that if he called the mainline to speak with me, I would refuse.

Around this time I noticed that I was not sleeping. I was having vivid nightmares that I was being held at gunpoint by clients. Every night was a different type of nightmare. It was impacting my sleep and therefore how I was showing up in every other part of my life. I remember walking around the grocery store the one day and I was physically present, but I was a shell of a human. I had nothing to live for, or felt like that at the time. I just wanted to disappear. How could I go on like this. Another time I was laying in my bed and the thoughts of suicide ran through my mind rapidly. I was no stranger to feeling this way, as I struggled with depression when I was a teenager, and diagnosed at the age of 17. I would come home crying every day, often for what felt like no reason. I was just so incredibly sad. I felt trapped. I was a single mom, so I couldn’t just not work.

The job market wasn’t booming, and where I was working, we employed most of the people working in this field at the time, in the area of harm reduction. My daughter would often sit at the kitchen table with me as I cried, and she would ask me what was wrong. All I could muster up was that I was sad and I could no longer work at my work anymore. Eventually I had this thought came over me “Chelsey, you either do something about this and take control, or it is going to take control over you”.

A friend of mine had reached out and told me about psychological injury through WCB. I had no idea what that was, and it was never talked about at work. We were always informed about WCB and what it could look like for being physically injured on the job site, but never did we talk about the mental health aspect, yet we were working with some of the most vulnerable people in our community, reviving people on the daily, multiple times a day, and supporting people in some of their worst times. It was tough, but for the most part, I loved what I did, except I was battling my own demons because my employer did not create a safe environment nor did they care.

I became this dark cloud. I knew I could easily influence people, good or bad. All around me people were miserable. People started to share their stories with me and the lack of support they got. Even though I felt so defeated, I also felt empowered. I marched into my Executive Directors office one day and said to her “how many more people are you going to let get hurt here before you do something about it?” At first she looked shocked, but then agreed to call the police. The same individual that sexually assaulted me, had done so to a few others, and there were many other instances that could have caused a major uproar in our community had they ended up worse. The police came, took my statement, and the client eventually got charged. We got a peace bond for a year.

My timelines are a bit blurry, but I did a google search about psychological injury, printed out the forms and started filling them out. I made a doctors appointment. Initially my doctor told me that he could give me a note for two weeks. I looked at him and said two weeks? That is not near enough time to unpack the amount of trauma I have right now. He then agreed to ask for three months, but said with uncertainty “I’m not sure you’ll get that long”. I ended up getting 10 months, approved by WCB, and my intense healing journey began.

I went to work, packed my things, and left. I had an incredible WCB worker who supported me and listened to me at every step of the way. I went to meet my first counsellor. It was not a good fit. She was too surface level for me, and I knew that I needed more. I advocated to my WCB worker that I wanted someone different. She found me another one, and it is someone I still see to this day when I am in need of a sounding board or struggling with whatever is going on in my life.

During one of our sessions, the counsellor and I talked about medication. I had never taken it before, because quite frankly, anti-depressants and medication in general scared me. I didn’t want to become addicted. We talked about some that had no addictive side effects and that medication didn’t have to be forever. I knew I also couldn’t continue to function on autopilot, not sleeping, and if I was going to dive into this work, I needed to do whatever it took to get me to where I wanted to be- happy, healthy and functioning, in a meaningful way.

Over the course of the 10 months, I engaged in deep trauma work. I participated in EMDR, which was the best thing for me, and an incredible process to go through. I will note, that you have to be in a window of tolerance to put yourself back into those traumatic experiences to process them. This is one of the reasons medication was so helpful for me, as it allowed for me to dig deep and put myself into places I couldn’t go otherwise. I was also doing the work. One thing that I learned through EMDR was the response that I got from my managers, was super triggering for me and my body stored that in an incredible way, but I did not recognize the impact their responses had on me, until I did the work. Sometimes it’s not always the incident itself that is the most impactful, it’s the responses we get when we come forward and tell our story/share our experience.

I began practicing gratitude everyday. I could focus on my school work (I was in a masters program during this time) and I got to be a fully present mom. A happy, healthier mom that my daughter deserved. I journaled, I read, I spent time outside. I went back to my roots. I felt like the most grounded version of myself. A whole person again, not someone who was shattered to pieces, trying to survive.

This time away from work and to focus on myself was the best thing that I could have done for myself. It allowed me to slow down and to focus on what mattered. I don’t believe in bouncing back because we never go back. As we grow and evolve, we continue to move forward, becoming newer, more refined versions of ourselves. The practice of journalling and gratitude is something that has stuck with me since. I am no longer medicated, and was able to come off all medication (supervised by my doctor) after a few years of doing the work and getting to a place where I was stable and able to manage on my own.

This was all during COVID, so a lot of my counselling sessions were online, including most of my EMDR work. We were then dealing with all of the mental stressors and unknowns that that COVID brought to us, schools shut down, I was forced to be a teacher as well as mom, and deal with everything else that I was going through…but we made it. and that’s what matters. I also had difficulties with medication dosage. We started low, but as I entered EMDR work, we upped my dosage. After about a few weeks I went back to my doctor and told him that I think that dosage was too high because I could not feel any emotions, which was not a great place to be. I learned that we are our own best advocates, even when it’s hard, we have to say something. We are all that we have, and we know ourselves best, so keep fighting. It’s the best thing we can do for ourselves, and for those around us.

I’ve shed many layers since this time. But I often remind myself of what that time gave me, and how important it is to take care of ourselves. To advocate even when it’s hard. Healing isn’t linear, there are times where I still feel a bit uneasy, as I don’t believe we are ever truly healed, but I am no longer hijacked by emotions or intense feelings of fear. The two individuals that caused me this harm have both since passed away. It’s unfortunate, but it has also allowed me to feel more at peace, knowing that they can never hurt me again.

Life is beautiful. I am so grateful for these experiences because they have shaped who I am, changed my perspective, and taught me resilience, so that I can show up in the version that I am today, to share my story and inspire others to know that there is hope, there is help, and there is a different way to live. PTSD does not have to be a death sentence, in fact, it can lead to post traumatic growth, and that is what I choose to focus on today.