
âScrubsâ was my favorite TV show growing up. It was on TV at around 4 p.m. every evening on ABC1. Iâd come home after a grueling day of senior school and be home just in time to veg out on my bed to a double bill. It made me forget about the day Iâd had.
I never liked school. I had good friends and I had favorite lessons, but Iâve always been highly introverted. Iâd find it extremely difficult to be around so many loud, opinionated people for six hours a day. Watching TV when I got home would help me to unwind and recharge.
If I was at school now, I think Iâd struggle more now then what I used to. When I was a teenager I didnât care about anything, and if I did care about something, Iâd simply need to be alone in my room to process, recharge, and then Iâd carry on. Donât get me wrong, I wasnât completely devoid of human emotion, but I coped on the bad days. I knew it was just a bad day. I was much more resilient and thicker-skinned back then.
Something changed when I became a mum, and Iâve been grieving ever since. I know we are meant to grow and change as people and in a lot of ways I have improved, and Iâm proud of how far Iâve come. But there are some things I have lost, and I feel really sad about it. I miss having a tougher skin and I miss my resilience. The reason for this is I believe these are the traits that should not have been taken from me. Iâm sad I have changed because my old self was stolen by trauma.
On bad days, I am oversensitive and I am incredibly anxious, to the point where at times I cannot leave the house. I worry a lot. I struggle to live in the moment. I forget a lot of things. Some days I have hardly any memories and other days I have too many memories that give me nightmares. I donât sleep well at night and I canât get up in the morning. I donât know how to react to people and everyday situations. I overanalyze my interactions because Iâm unsure if Iâve been oversensitive or not, or if Iâve come across as inarticulate or dumb. I find social interactions really hard because I am waiting for something bad to happen. It bugs me that Iâve changed, doing things I never used to do and having problems I never used to struggle with â but I finally understand why. I am not well. I am struggling with depression, anxiety, dissociation, derealization and depersonalization â due to repeated trauma.
This is why I have changed. It turns out Iâm not as abnormal as I think I am. Iâm having a normal reaction to a chain of abnormal events.
There are a range of physical and emotional symptoms that trauma survivors struggle with on a day-to-day basis. The emotional and psychological symptoms are:
- Shock, denial, or disbelief
- Confusion and difficulty concentrating
- Anger, irritability, mood swings
- Anxiety and fear
- Guilt, shame, self-blame
- Withdrawing from others
- Feeling sad or hopeless
- Feeling disconnected or numb
There are also physical symptoms too. These include insomnia or nightmares, fatigue, palpitations, aches and pains and muscle tension.
I have struggled with many of these symptoms due to a string of traumatic events. I am very much in recovery; I completed therapy a month ago and I have recently started antidepressants because I have realized that trauma has made me forget who I am. Anxiety has made me forget who I am. Depression and acknowledging my childhood trauma has taken away my old self.
I am not expecting to return to the person I used to be; I know I am expected to grow and be a healthier person now that I am reaching the end of what has been a very long and dark tunnel. But I feel like I am on the other end of the extreme, unsure of who I am and how to feel.
I feel the need to check out of reality in order to heal again. And the way I do this is to watch my favorite TV shows. It is usually sitcoms that make me sit back and think about my life. I donât know how they do it, but watching something funny and upbeat that captures real-life brings me back down to Earth.
âBrooklyn 99â is one of the shows that helps me and has caused me to reassess my life. It reminds me of the group of friends I had when I was well â but I lost everything when I had to move house after family trauma. I lost what most consider a normal life. I donât have any friends. Iâm a stay-at-home mom, which means I was isolated before the pandemic. I find interacting hard, some days.
When I watch âBrooklyn 99,â I see that busy precinct and I am reminded of how I used to be like Rosa â laid back, didnât care about much, a loyal friend and people knew not to mess with me. Now I wouldnât even be able to enter the room knowing it was full of people, and knowing that I would be oversensitive and take their banter to heart because my anxiety makes me easy to trigger.
I have recently been told by my therapist that I dissociate. I was already aware of this, but I didnât know just how long or how deeply I had been dissociating. I have written about my dissociation before, and the way I have been taught to deal with this is by grounding myself. When I start dissociating from the present and slip into the past, I have to distract myself. One of the ways I do this is to watch comedies â but since watching my favorite boxsets, Iâve been thinking a lot about how I used to be, and have been feeling a sense of nostalgia as I watch the shows I used to watch when I was younger.
Watching shows like âScrubsâ has made me realize what I want. I want to live a normal life. I donât want to be scared of danger walking down the street. I want to be resilient again. I donât want to be anxious around crowds. I donât want to be so depressed I canât get out of bed. I donât want to keep being immobilized by the past. I want to live a normal life, firmly stuck in the present, in a job I like with a close circle of friends. I want to be happy.
It may sound positive, my sudden realizations of who I want to be as my favorite shows force memories to come flooding back. But I am also aware that because of the way I react to trauma, I am likely to get so absorbed in things that stimulate my mind, I can dissociate too deeply into things like TV and games and become an unresponsive couch potato. I have found myself wanting to live inside the TV and be someone else for a while until the pain of reality stops.
It may sound strange that TV has taught me how to feel, but itâs been a game-changer. Itâs made me think, really think, about the life I want and how I react to everyday stimuli. Itâs not ânormalâ to get so absorbed in a boxset on Netflix that you donât want to live your real life at all.
Iâm determined to stop dissociating from reality as heavily as I do. I am determined to turn my life around so I can be a better and more present parent for my son. I know what it feels like to feel neglected, and be constantly worrying about your parents who you know are under a lot of stress and are losing themselves because of it, but you donât know why. I donât want my son to go through what I went through. I donât want him to spend his childhood worrying about Mummyâs mental health, or wondering what Mummy is thinking about today and when sheâll be back from her dream world.
I donât think anyone should hate their real lives. No one should feel the need to excessively escape their reality, or be so distressed that they simply donât want to be here anymore. Thatâs what watching more TV during lockdown has taught me. I am not 100 percent happy with my life, and I should do something to change that. Because after everything I have been through and how far Iâve come, I deserve a good life. I deserve to be happy.
A version of this story originally appeared on Medium
source https://www.programage.com/news/How_TV_Helped_With_My_Dissociative_Disorder_1599534013176872.html
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