How I Manage My PTSD When The World Feels Like It's Falling Apart

Mental health care for modern times

Photo by Valeriia Bugaiova on Unsplash

Even though I wasn’t officially diagnosed until 2021, I believe that I’ve had complex posttraumatic stress disorder (cPTSD) since I was a tiny girl of five years old. The “complex” part represents having multiple traumas at different stages of my life, both as a child and adult.

Having this complex form of PTSD complicates my treatment and affects me every single day in the form of triggers with panic responses, fear over even the most simple of things (like showering or washing the dishes) and occasional dissociation and numbing where I don’t feel like I’m even in the world at all.

I’ve spent most of my life this way. Desperate not to feel any pain or emotions (too scary), I’ve even battled addiction due to my constant desire to numb out and be disconnected from everything that seems too big for me to handle. I’ve avoided people, places and things because of my fear. This has caused me to miss out on some potentially amazing things in my life, like seeing a Prince in concert in 1984 and visiting the hot springs in North Carolina this past year.

If my PTSD was complex before, it got a hundred times worse about a decade ago. I was never really into politics until I met my husband in 2013. Back then, he was an avid Fox News viewer, so I would sit with him while he watched. I disagreed with quite a bit of what was said, but I was a huge people pleaser then and didn’t want my hubby to think I was putting him down or trying to argue.

We all know what happened to politics in 2015. When we first heard that a certain somebody was running for president, my first thought was that it might be kind of entertaining for a while. Now, it’s hard to believe I used that word to describe him. It was never entertainment but instead became a harsh and scary reality.

The shows on Fox News that we watched started to become less factual and more opinion driven, and eventually hubby and I changed the channel. They clearly seemed to have a favorite candidate in the race for president in 2016, something I’d never noticed the news doing before. However, the more I heard about the whole thing, the more fear I felt.

For several years, I became one of those Facebook people who posted about politics all the time, thinking I had to warn people about what would surely happen if Republicans won. As it turned out, I never changed one supporter’s mind over all those years of doom posting. All that happened was my PTSD getting worse and worse with every new and shocking event that happened in our country.

There were a few political bright spots over the years. I loved Joe Biden (still do) and got much better sleep every night he was president. His kindness and empathy made me feel so hopeful for the country, and I prayed we would all come together the way he wanted. I also felt the wave of joy that Kamala Harris brought to her campaign in the summer of 2024. For the first time in years, I thought that everything might be okay after all. We know what happened after that.

It’s my firm belief that a lot of us out there have somewhat of a collective type of PTSD right now. There’s no way that a person can endure so much stress in whatever form it takes for each of us over such a long period of time. It took a while, but I realized that all my anger and bitterness over the state of our nation were actually fear and terror, like a constant jump scare playing on a loop on my TV and phone.

It took me even longer to figure out that we’ve been made to feel afraid on purpose. The current administration wants us to be afraid, and so do the cable news networks. Consider this past weekend when the same car was shown on fire by CNN from a hundred different angles because there was barely any other “riot-type” footage to show. They want us to be so scared that we keep watching to see what horrible thing will happen next. Of course, horrible is a relative term, as what they show you isn’t always the whole story.

I’ve been as bad as everyone else about doomscrolling and shitposting and dropping all my beliefs in somebody’s comments, even as I know that these things are huge no-no’s for somebody with already precarious mental health. I’d get so upset that my heart would pound and my body would shake from rage and terror, and I’d feel so ugly inside from fighting with my Facebook friends online and then ending the friendship (me or them) over politics.

It made me feel anxious every second and constantly stirred up, and eventually I felt like I should spend at least part of my time doing things that made me happy. Not that I wanted to be ignorant of what was going on in the world, but it occurred to me that I could literally die at any time without having experienced full joy and appreciation for my life and the lives of those I loved and the glimmers of beauty in the world itself.

Although I like to have the TV on all day, especially on the rare occasions when I’m home by myself, I’ve been muting it a lot more often. I can still see the headlines at the bottom of the screen if I happen to walk by, but I don’t have to hear pundits slanting the actual story with their opinions. I’ve also subscribed to a few Substacks of journalists I trust not to lie about things because they’ve been proven right over time (also, it’s fun to hear them cuss like a sailor the way they couldn’t do on network TV).

I rediscovered books, which I’d loved my whole life, but I was far too anxious to sit and read for at least a decade. I listened to my favorite music in my earbuds while on my porch swing watching the world go by. Over time, I spent as much time outside as I used to inside while glued to the news.

We only get one precious life to live, and I refuse to spend most of it ruminating about things that may or may not happen. Of course, it’s important to be aware of what’s going on and educate myself, but my heart and soul don’t have to live there full time. In all the planets in all the galaxies of the world, we are blessed enough to be here on an Earth full of life and people and tiny miracles that happen every day. Everything else seems small in comparison.

I’m certainly not perfect and still have my moments of dread and worry, but they are fewer and farther between. I try to react to the “bigger picture” rather than every little “gotcha” that pops up in the news. I think there are now so many people who struggle to keep from spiraling because of the trauma this country has gone through, and I truly send each one of them my support. I think helping each other is kind of our purpose in life anyway.

I firmly believe this is the way we get through this, by kindly reaching for our neighbor’s hand and harnessing our collective strength to keep trudging ahead. After all, every single one of us belongs to the same race… the human race.

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