YOU Triggered my CPTSD

Faced with a boring weekend ahead of me, I started to watch YOU. It was immediately an audience grabber from the get go. I hit pause, pondering … why haven’t I watched this yet? There’s already 3 seasons… I hit play and as the true meaning of the narrator starts to hit, I am reminded, I don’t have to watch YOU. I already lived YOU.

I pushed through determined to not let the past define me and my ability to just watch T.V shows like everyone else in the Nation. I tried to ignore it but 3 episodes in I can’t. Too many triggers. I was correct when season one came out. I can’t watch YOU. I have 17 years of life dealing with CPTSD due to nine years of abuse. I am really good at catching even the tiniest sliver of a trigger, because some days that’s all it takes to send me on a spiral that will lead my head into the past.

My first husband met me when I was in 10th grade. He had already graduated horn our hush school the year before. He was a friend of my boyfriend at the time. They were a such a weird mix, so much that I couldn’t understand how they became friends in the first place, until years later.

He was there when my boyfriend and I broke up over pre-existing issues. He swooped in like a knight in shining armor, such a rare gentleman, different than all the others. For weeks he magically appeared at the right moments, always with a smile, there to save my day. I was fooled. I had two kids with him and we even got married.

It was NOT UNTIL AFTER our first child did I find out he knew me when I was in high school, not as a sophomore, but as a freshman when he was a senior. I never knew him at that time. He would see me when I was in the library or out smoking a cig in the smoking area. Our high school had a smoking section out by the parking lot off school property. He saw me when I was standing by my car broke down on the side of the road on quite a few occasions. Apparently he stopped more then once to offer me a ride that I declined.

He purposely befriended my boyfriend upon meeting him through another friend. Mr. Crazy already knew that I was this guys girlfriend because he was already stalking me! He found out one of his friends knew my boyfriend, set it up so all three would meet, and inserted himself into our lives.

Over the years I discovered he had stalked me since ninth grade. Apparently even before we had officially met in person, not just in passing. Way before we started dating, he figured out where I lived, gained access to my house, he even learned my whole yard. How he got in I will never know because we had a fully fenced yard with a locked gate, and I lived in a commune with lots of people… No one saw him.

When we were dating he would wait on the other side of the fence until I left for the school bus, and then he would check my room to see what I did during the night after we got off the phone. We didn’t have cell phones then, just beepers. When I would turn down seeing him to hang out with friends, when my friends and I would be hanging out in my yard, he was secretly on the other side of the fence watching and listening. He told me this in detail 8 years later, giggling about it while holding a shotgun.

He was watching everything I did before I knew him, and I did not know until 7 years later. He had gradually gotten crazier, more obsessed with me because he could possess me but not make me love him. He started trying to kill me because … well, he is a psycho. I had to run in the middle of the night with two children and escaped to a different state.

He is still out there. Going to Church. Going to work, grocery shopping, and living a normal looking life. He’s scary because you would never know that such an upstanding clean cut Christian man with that smooth smile and bright eyes could be… pure evil.

If you have ever been in a stalker situation, you need to know that there can be triggers if you choose to watch YOU.

We are not victims. We are Survivors.