PTSD in a pandemic 3 (COVID-19 in Australia): Chaos and PTSD don't mix

Danger and chaos.  Daily life in a pandemic.  Disastrous for pre-existing complex PTSD, this virus a creeping, compounding layer of trauma.  Life has moved back in time to a chaotic, fearful childhood place - something I thought that I’d escaped, decades ago, each change in this world a sudden punch – well targeted, to inflict the greatest harm.  

Just like in childhood, I have no power in this new-old world, and no one else seems in control either.  A fact that makes my PTSD hell a pandemic itself – my world, at best only ever semi-safe, now terrifyingly unsafe.  Full of shrapnel, sharper now, harder, faster, gap-less.  Torture.  Out. Of. Control.  Explaining my increasingly out of control rage and tears – a response to a fear too big for me.

I need calm and no one around me is calm.  The more uncalm they are, the more my shrapnel spins.  The more it spins, the more unsafe I am.  Like a well-loved child I need someone stable to take charge.

But, crisis changes people, morphing each into who knows who, all of them with terrifying power over me – because I need them even more now.  However - Some of those people who used to be negotiable, are suddenly not.  Some who used to be open, are now secretive. The sudden agitated caginess of others is only feeding my always suspicious mind.   

And then there are those who seem reliably the same – but will they stay that way?

In my mind, everything is uncertain, and anyone can just do what they want to me, whenever they want.  And I have to suck it up.  Or be alone.  

A world in crisis is a lonely, unpredictable world.  I thought that I had it all down pat – what in my environment I need to be alert to, to avoid harm and keep safe – physically and emotionally.  But suddenly it has all changed. 

Now I am afraid to cough or take items from supermarket shelves – lest someone hits me, fearing I have this virus, or simply because they want what I have.  Worse, anyone can carry this disease – even without knowing it.  Meaning that now everyone is dangerous to me, not just a few people.  I feel threatened, more than I have for years, my nerves on edge.  These new dangers have to be incorporated into my PTSD hyper-alert “list of things which harm”.  Imagine I had 1000 things on that list.  Now I have 1100. 

1100 plus a new social distance rule that I struggle to remember, often misinterpret and which is creepingly destroying the stable structure and routine I need – that structure and routine which in normal life helps damp down that chaos which is always inside me.  The chaos that is now more and more visible to others, as I am less and less able to self-regulate.  Something I never learnt to do anyway.  I am now in a hellish place where there is no control – not even of myself.  Until I feel that I just cannot cope with one thing more.  Not one.

The more chaotic the world, the worse my PTSD is.   

Written March, 2020; revised July, 2020