How do I cope after losing both parents and battling PTSD?
Question
I lost both of my parents within the span of two years. My mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and endured immense suffering during the final three months of her life. Watching her decline was one of the most painful experiences I have ever faced.
My father, a stroke survivor with multiple health issues of his own, stayed by her side constantly. Despite our urging, he refused to rest or take breaks. He sat by her bed day after day, week after week, often in tears. Just a few months after her passing, he died suddenly.
I have since been diagnosed with PTSD, both from past trauma and the emotional toll of caring for my mother. Her surgery left her with severe wounds, and without going into graphic detail, the things I saw during that time continue to haunt me, even now – nearly two years later.
I struggle daily with thoughts of suicide and have come close to acting on them more than once.
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Answer
There is grief and then there is grief. Your case would best be placed in the latter category, it would seem, and not without reason. You have lost both parents in a very short span of time. You have lived through both your mother’s agony, and your father’s, and had no way to help them bear their terrible burdens. And, it would seem, you came to the party having already experienced some other issues that left you susceptible to a diagnosis of PTSD. This trauma is very recent, having ended only several months ago. I think you are understandably devastated.
Not everyone who is in the middle of grief benefits from seeing a therapist, much less a psychiatrist, but in your complicated case, with PTSD present, a very personally traumatic and painful double loss, and most importantly, persistently suicidal thoughts and attempts, my sense is that you would benefit from professional care, both psychotherapeutic and psychiatric. Medications can help reduce some of the impact of your symptoms and help lift and support your mood. Forming a relationship with a caring therapist can help you have ready access to an external point of view who can be a sounding board for you, if that will help; who can help you reality test; who can encourage and support you; who can offer you or point you towards interventions (such as EMDR for intrusive memories, self-soothing for jangled nerves, etc.) that might help reduce or better manage your symptoms.
A professional therapist can also serve an important monitoring function which would seem almost necessary given your active suicidal thoughts, and can (if you alert them), help keep you safe from yourself by arranging for hospitalization when that might be necessary. If you aren’t already under professional care, I urge you to make appointments shortly. You should do this even if money is tight for you, as your suicidal condition is potentially lethal.
You are understandably devastated. Things will never be the same again, and you have lost very important supports in your life. To the extent that you have true PTSD which goes untreated (or which doesn’t respond well to treatment), you can also expect to vividly relive painful memories of some of the very difficult things you’ve experienced periodically throughout your life. In that sense, to the extent that PTSD hangs around, you can expect to experience a rather protracted grief process. While all of this is true, what is also true is that each day is a potential new opportunity to heal, to make new supportive connections with others, to support others, and to find meaning in life despite the wounds you’ve suffered. You may feel like you want to die; you may be very depressed right now; but life can get better, far better, than it is for you right now. If you can find a way to endure what you need to endure; if you can detach yourself to some degree from what is painful; you will find opportunities for new growth. Life can return to a new balance of normal if you allow it, want it, and work for it.
PTSD is a type of anxiety disorder, believe it or not. Like most anxiety disorders, it involves a large amount of wanting to avoid something frightening. The act of avoiding what is frightening helps make the anxiety of PTSD worse, but the catch-22 of PTSD is that the stuff that you want to avoid seems so horrific that you can’t tolerate it and so must try to avoid it anyway. One of the ways that PTSD is treated is to help sufferers to better tolerate what they are afraid of, so that they don’t have to avoid it, and therefore so that they can function better. It’s hard to function when you are avoiding horrific memories. The memories don’t go away even when treatment is successful, but their impact can lessen in intensity.
There are a variety of ways that PTSD exposure therapies are conducted. One approach uses the container of trust that forms within a therapeutic relationship to support patients’ talking about their traumas. Talking about things helps some people (not all!) to feel more normal about what they’ve experienced, and (perhaps more importantly) helps them to realize that they don’t necessarily come apart when they do talk about what they’re tortured by. This learning help reduce the impact of the intrusive memories. It is important that such exposure therapy be done carefully and slowly.
Another approach, called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or ACT helps people develop a detached perspective on the contents of their own minds that helps reduce the power of those contents. As people strengthen their ability to disembody themselves from the thoughts and feelings in their minds, various traumas lose some of their horror.
Anyway, you might look into one or another of these sorts of therapy approaches for your PTSD, suicidal thoughts and grief. If you can lessen the need to run from these memories you’re stuck with, you will have less need to escape life and will improve your ability to function, which in turn will make it easier for you to develop a new life for yourself. This is very likely possible for you to accomplish, given the appropriate support which I hope you will seek out.