Dealing with emotional trauma

So as I left off in My Story, I had shut my feelings away.  I also returned home and that added distance only assisted my slip into denial.  Since I was away from R I could fool myself into just feeling like we hadn't talked for awhile.  Naturally this was not the best way to handle this situation, and it began to take its toll.

At first I think I was able to fake it to make it.  For the first year after R's death I was able to handle life, I was in denial after all.  Even when some of the other guys tried suicide as a result of R's death I was somewhat emotionally detached from the situation.  My body had gone into its survival mode, and its defense mechanism was to cut off emotional feelings.  By the time the first anniversary of R's death came around I could no longer deny what had happened.  That first one year anniversary hit me like a ton of bricks one night at work.  Luckily it was at the end of my shift.

Now I could not shut away the feelings and I instantly had to deal with it.  Closing away my feelings had taken a toll on me internally and now it was starting to show.  I reached out to some peer support groups and was advised to go to my doctor and make sure nothing else was wrong, no sudden changes in health or anything.  After the doctor made sure I was in good health I was given an anti-anxiety/anti-depression prescription.  This did help me a lot at this period of my life, but I later learned it had a lot of adverse reactions as well.  I will say at this point that I did not allow this situation to affect my work.  I was still able to compartmentalize when I went to work, but now that the one year anniversary had come along it was harder for me to keep that buffer up.  I began feeling anxious at just the thought of going to work.  Since my job deals with trauma on a regular basis this added to the situation.  The medication I was put on helped with this and allowed me to continue to compartmentalize my feelings, but it also deadened my feelings a lot.

One of the biggest areas these events affected my life was my relationship with my wife and my bills.  I continued to be there for my kids and in many ways they helped me in healing a little bit too.  However, handling regular life was something I allowed myself not to face.  By not facing R's death it seems I had set a precedence for other aspects of my life.  I made it ok to hide from things that added stress.  You would think this carried over to my career, but because of my wife and kids depending on me to provide for them I didn't allow this to happen.  I did struggle with some sick time usage as keeping all those emotions locked away for so long caused a depression in my immune system.  I became more susceptible to regular sicknesses that had not affected me before.  Luckily I had the sick time to do this.

I have since gone to a therapist to talk about a lot of these issues and my therapist has stated that because of the traumatic events in my childhood I returned to some of my coping mechanisms that I developed back then.  When I was a child I would often hide under my bed when my dad became violent.  Later in life I reacted with a temper, but at this point in my life I was metaphorically hiding under the bed again.

We started to fall behind with our bills because I was ignoring them, it was all I could do to pull myself together and compartmentalize my feelings to go to work.  I was also finally using my GI Bill to go to school online.  I was exhausted from all of this and facing the bills was something I allowed myself to hide from.  There was more trauma to come and something needed to change.