My First grade Teacher gave me cPTSD

I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder(cPTSD). I got this condition from elementary school, where I was the victim of verbal bullying. The most problematic years were first and fourth grade, but it was not exclusively those years. I’ll be talking about first grade, as it created the condition. The rest of the years I was in public district school were rough, but they did not spark the condition, they only added to it, preventing me from healing.

I am dyslexic and have ADHD. In first grade, I could not read or spell for those reasons. I, however, did well in all of the other academic areas. Due to that, my teacher deemed that I was too smart to be illiterate. She thought that I was faking it to spite her. She decided that the best way to handle it would be to publicly shame me and get the other students to join in. I don’t remember much from that year, for multiple reasons. One of the things I do remember was pretending I could read a book that I had memorized.

That was the event, now for a bit about trauma and childhood brain development.

One part of early childhood development is gaining core beliefs. A core belief is something usually acquired before the age of seven. For the most part, they are subconscious but affect quite a bit of someone’s everyday life and their worldview. They can be changed, if you can figure out where they came from, that is. Due to my first grade teacher, one of mine is that authoritative figures, especially within a school setting, cannot be trusted with my weaknesses for they will use it to hurt me.

Now, what is complex PTSD? The therapist that diagnosed me with it first described it as PTSD on steroids. That, while simplified, is completely true. The symptoms of cPTSD can include those from PTSD, heightened startle response, issues with loud noise, flashbacks, night terrors, etc. but it can also include more life-altering things such as compartmentalization, hypervigilance, lowered self-confidence, mistrust, fear of intimacy, and avoidance, and many more. Hypervigilance, avoidance, and compartmentalization will be explained shortly

Now let me tell you all just how life-changing that year was.

As I mentioned I got cPTSD from that year, but what does that mean? Let's start with a huge change in demeanor. Before first grade, I was a social butterfly and an extreme extrovert that would talk to anyone. Now, I’m an introvert, and there are only two places that I feel comfortable going up and talking to a stranger, and even in those places, I still sometimes feel like an outcast.

A common symptom of cPTSD that I have is hypervigilance. This one affects my every waking moment and has for the vast majority of my life. Imagine you’re facing a wall of ten to twenty TVs all playing different shows, all of them have the sound on, and you NEED to know at least the basic plot of each show, at ALL times. Now, imagine that other TVs are flickering through channels. You need to pay extra attention to those because you never know when something important will come on. The TVs are of everything going on around you. You have to listen to every conversation in the room, no matter how little you care about them. You also need to keep track of everyone in the room. If you can’t do this, say, you have your back to the room and the entrance, you don’t feel safe, and there are more flickering channels.

I also still have compartmentalization. For me, and many others, it means every part of my life gets put and locked away in different compartments in my mind. It can be hard, or even impossible to access things from a compartment that I'm not in. When I'm in a different compartment, I might as well be in a different reality. When I was home, I couldn't consciously remember all of the terrible things that happened to me at school. This also affects all parts of my life. With therapy, it has gotten better, but my life is still broken into these compartments. I forget about people and things that happen on a regular basis. If I’m not in the only compartment that I see someone in, most of the time they just don’t exist elsewhere. For example, I went to a nearby boarding school for the last two years of high school. I had a girlfriend there. Things were going well, then, towards the end of my last year, she came over for a weekend, and my mind started flipping out. She left the school compartment and into the rest of the world compartment. All of a sudden my mind thought about the future and started processing the fact that we lived about four hours away, and my brain couldn’t process reality and problem solve that quickly, and I had to break up with her. Had I not compartmentalized everything, I would have realized that she existed outside of school and tried to find a way to make it work.

This next problem is something specific to my experience. For the first few years of college, I could not get myself to go to my professors' office hours until I got to know them, deeming them safe. What happened in first grade still affected me in college. It was my core belief from first grade, that says that showing weakness to an academic authority figure was “dangers.”

There are shows, movies, or books that I want to watch/read but it takes place in a school, my avoidance makes me afraid to even try and enjoy it for fear that there will be verbal bullying and that it will trigger me. Sometimes just seeing or hearing the word bullying triggers me. By trigger, I don’t mean it makes me a little uncomfortable and upset. I mean actually triggered. Responses to being triggered vary from person to person. Mine may include but are not limited to: waves of paralyzing terror, temporary loss of the ability to walk and or talk, dissociation, and age regression, all of these can last hours, sometimes until the next day. Disoseating means that my brain partially or completely shuts down. Age regression means that my mind regresses to the age of the trauma. Have fun trying to be an adult when you’re mentally a scared six-year-old, especially when you may not even have access to your whole brain.

I couldn't make any improvements or work on any of my symptoms until I could have an actual conversation with a therapist. This could not happen until I was twenty and in college. My core belief prevented me from sharing my struggles to a stranger in a position of authority for fourteen years.

Teachers, parents, and anyone that works with young kids be careful how you treat them. You have the potential to change their life for the worse or for the better.