From the Just So I'm Better Understood File #001

For those of you who don’t know, on a Meyers-Briggs scale, I’m a textbook case for an INFJ. Down to my blood and gristle. The introversion, the intense level of feelings, the intuition, the constant need for solitude and the taffy pull of desperately needing a few particular people in my life and shunning the rest of humanity. I’m not that guy you invite to the bar for a bender, because I’m that guy you stay up talking with until 2 am.

(I am also a textbook Pisces - but I don’t put any stock in horoscopes. Still, the details of that sign are very much me. Don’t ask me why or how.)

But what adds to it is the fact that I also suffer from Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is a relatively new thing to me, in that I was only diagnosed with it in the last year and that I finally have a “term” for what goes on in my head and my heart. My current doctor doesn’t like giving “firm prognosis”, (which is something I agree with since they can be limiting) but this is what I’m being treated for, so for the sake of brevity, this is what I have.

The thing is that one brings out the other in spades. INFJs tend to have that old adage of “still waters run deep” while C-PTSD also has an added detail of my staring off into space to think or simply “blanking out” very often. I tend to retreat from life at every opportunity and it becomes more pronounced both with age and with (particular kinds of) stress. So one feeds the other - my personality and my disorder - so its hard to see where one begins and one ends.

If you’ve known me at all for any length of time, the following list from the Wikipedia entry of the “Adult symptom cluster" should make some sense to you. Edits are based on my own history, emphasis meaning habitual occurrences and strike-outs meaning not applicable.

• Difficulties regulating emotions, including symptoms such as persistent dysphoria, chronic suicidal preoccupation, self injury, explosive or extremely inhibited anger (may alternate), or compulsive or extremely inhibited sexuality (may alternate).

• Variations in consciousness, including forgetting traumatic events (i.e., psychogenic amnesia), reliving experiences (either in the form of intrusive PTSD symptoms or in ruminative preoccupation), or having episodes of dissociation.

• Changes in self-perception, such as a chronic and pervasive sense of helplessness, paralysis of initiative, shame, guilt, self-blame, a sense of defilement or stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings

• Varied changes in the perception of the perpetrator, such as attributing total power to the perpetrator, becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the perpetrator, including a preoccupation with revenge, idealization or paradoxical gratitude, a sense of a special relationship with the perpetrator or acceptance of the perpetrator’s belief system or rationalizations.

• Alterations in relations with others, including isolation and withdrawal, persistent distrust, a repeated search for a rescuer, disruption in intimate relationships and repeated failures of self-protection.

• Loss of, or changes in, one’s system of meanings, which may include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair.

Largely, aside from an occasional meltdown (once every three months, tops - more often twice a year), I hold everything together and keep on truckin’. I’m not medicated nor does my doctor think I need any but its a struggle to see where one thing ends and the other begins because there is so much “natural” overlap.
However, with this new (sorta) diagnosis, I’m finding that I need to do something about my triggers. Most of them are based around work and, though they’re for solid reasons (or so I’ve been told), my … emotional reaction (or lack) is not. So, basically, its time to find something else - and the trick hat is the anxiety and frustration centered around doing *just that*. As was eloquently pointed out to me, I was never allowed to fail growing up - that is to say, everything had to be done right the first time and if it didn’t work, you’re fucked forever - so trying something without being utterly sure of its success is unnerving, to say the least of it.

But then, again, I’m an INFJ. So where do I even begin?