The Basics
My name is Sunny, and I am 27 years old. I graduated from college with a double major in psychology and political science, and although psychology was a supplemental degree after I originally chose to major in political science, it turned out that psychology is my passion. I work as a clinical research specialist right now in an Alzheimer’s and dementia research clinic, and my goal is to become a clinical psychologist with a specialization in attachment trauma in teenagers and young adults. My dream is to build a place like St. Jude’s Cancer Hospital but for mental health, where the providers are some of the best experts in the country, the care is top-notch and state-of-the-art, with a view towards overall wellness, both physical and mental, and most importantly, all care is free and both the patient and the families/loved ones are well-supported throughout and beyond treatment. I know that this is probably a pipe dream, but from my rather extensive experience in the mental healthcare world, I also know that this is so very needed in the mental healthcare community.
Some Backstory...
I experienced complex trauma during childhood – specifically, attachment trauma. For the uninitiated, complex trauma refers to trauma that occurs over an extended period of time, and is most commonly seen in children in an abusive household. Relatedly, attachment trauma refers to trauma from your “attachment figures” – major people in your childhood who are meant to provide you with care and protection, such as parents, older siblings, grandparents, perhaps teachers or coaches. Many people with complex trauma end up diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (or another personality disorder) when they get older, as was the case with me. I have also been diagnosed with severe recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD) and anxiety.
So what does all that mean? How does it impact my life from day to day? Well, starting with the simplest of the diagnoses, my anxiety tends to show up as fear of something happening to my loved ones, or that different things will affect my most meaningful relationships in the worst ways, or that the people I care most about will suddenly stop caring about me or realize that I am secretly a terrible person and that I have been fooling them all along. There are more ways it appears, but those are some of the most common.
My depression tends to be all-encompassing, and is essentially a chronic illness. It affects my daily energy levels, my stamina, how quickly I get fatigued, how much sleep and rest I need, what I am able to accomplish throughout the day, my appetite, even nausea. For example, even simple things like showering, going grocery shopping, cooking a meal and cleaning up afterwards, and doing laundry can exhaust me, and on bad days I can only do one or two of these things at most. And of course, there’s also the many cognitive and emotional ways it shows up in my life. The way I feel about myself, the way I view my future, crying spells that last hours at a time, feeling some level of suicidality even at baseline, and more. Of course, not everyone’s depression is this severe or manifests in their life the way my depression does in mine, but I share this as an example with the hope that perhaps it will be easier to understand other people in your life who may have depression.
I’ll combine the effects of my complex PTSD and borderline personality disorder into one section, both because they’re so inter-related that it’s hard to tease apart what is what (although this is kind of true just generally), and because a lot of symptoms can be traced back to both. One of the things about BPD is that it makes relationships difficult, particularly close relationships. In my experience, the closer the relationship, or the more you care about the relationship, the more likely it is to go off the rails. For me, it’s like my brain becomes so fixated on that person or that relationship that I lose sight of the big picture and even lose the ability to think logically. That’s kind of the overall gist of what BPD is for me – my emotions take over my whole brain, it feels like there’s a hurricane going on inside my head, and asking me to think straight is like spinning someone around in a washing machine cycle over and over again and then immediately asking them which way is up. And there will be times when I think that I do know which way is up, that I am thinking straight, when I am absolutely NOT. Those are the most dangerous times, because that’s when I’ll make decisions that are terrible decisions that end up, as my beloved psychologist says, “shooting me in the foot”, but meanwhile I still think that I’ve pointed the gun at the bad guy, not myself.
I’ll share more throughout my posts about how different things are affecting me, how I’m feeling, and what my thoughts are like, in addition to my treatment journey, but think of this as a brief summary and overview of my backstory, who I am, and how I ended up where I am now. Thank you for your interest in my story, and I hope my sharing it will help even one other person in the smallest of ways.
P.S. – I might have ADHD. Still need to be tested. Undiagnosed but peer reviewed!