In this article, I use the term C-PTSD to mean Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I deliberately use C-PTSD to indicate that PTSD isn't an illness that lasts for short amounts of time (although it can). PTSD can last a lifetime, hence the use of C-PTSD.
Warning: This article talks about sexual assault and C-PTSD
I am processing a bizarre encounter. I had agreed to have a drink with a guy. He was a well-paid architect who lived in Buckhead in the Atlanta area. Buckhead is the NICE part of town. We met at a neighborhood bar to get to know each other.
Eventually, he asked why I had a service dog, and I explained my heart condition. He then asked with a lot of passion.
"How does that impact your daily life? Not much, I would assume."
I found this odd and struggled to answer. This was a highly personal question for someone I had just met. I am trying to quantify the number of times I nearly pass out in a day, the energy that is consumed by those episodes, and the fear of those episodes returning to the levels of 10 to 15 a day before finding a medication that worked. Or how that medication has adversely affected my teeth. All of this is difficult to explain in a short conversation. I felt like I had been asked to justify my disability.
Then he revealed he had a disability. At the young age of 17, his hands lost the ability to grip things. He could no longer play sports, which clearly still bothered him. His hands don't work well. He would reveal that he found this to be a great hardship until he met a guy with only one arm, "I mean, I still have my hands, as craptastic as they are. This guy, he was really disabled. I mean, he didn't have an arm!"
I absorbed the subtle dig at me, that my disability wasn't as big a hardship as someone with a physical disability, and changed the subject.
Trying to find some common ground by asking the guy about his hobbies. He revealed he was writing a book about perseverance and his life. I said I was also writing a book about being indomitable. He then launched into a chapter-by-chapter blow of his book. He continued to get more passionate about his life and all the difficulties he faced because of his disability.
"If you think you have had it hard, believe me, you haven't had it as hard as me. I will beat you every time," he finally exclaimed, pointing a finger at me.
"If you think you have had it hard, believe me, you haven't had it as hard as me. I will beat you every time," he finally exclaimed, pointing a finger at me.
I boxed up my unfinished dinner and settled my tab immediately. As I was doing this, he continued to rant and rave to me, exclaiming how difficult his life had been and how relatively easy mine had been. He was looking for validation, and I was withholding speaking. This made him angry, and his voice rose as he continued to look at me, waiting for my agreement about the harshness of his life.
"You never asked me about my book," I quietly cut him off as I rose and gathered my things, "If you had, I would have told you my book is about being indomitable while living with a genetic heart condition, suffering a chronic illness, and being raped by my father until I was eighteen when I went to a battered woman's shelter."
His cheeks were red as he covered his face with his hand, shaking his head.
"The next time you point your finger at someone to tell them they haven't had it as bad as you, " I continued, my voice raising with the words, "I want you to remember this moment and think twice about judging others and their disabilities based on how they look.."
He continued to cover his face and shake his head for a moment and then suddenly looked up and said, "Were you raped every day?"
"Were you raped every day?"
This is the hardship of invisible illness and disability. Even those who are physically disabled and have struggled with their disability will judge those of us who look normal. The CDC has equated disability with physical ailments. Without some external and physical marker of disability, those with invisible disabilities struggle to be believed, accepted, and counted as disabled.
Not all disability is visible or easily detected or apparent.
If I am being honest, this incident is still baffling to me. However, I have struggled with viewing my disability and hardships as more than others. It takes a compassionate heart and discerning eye to understand that everyone is different and that disabilities and trauma affect us differently, and that is acceptable..
It takes a compassionate heart and discerning eye to understand that everyone is different and that disabilities and trouble affect us differently. That is acceptable and expected. It makes it impossible to rank disability and hardship.
One incident of rape may be enough to catastrophically and irrevocably impact a human. It may mean that this incident turns their life around so that functioning becomes nearly impossible.
When you start ranking trauma, it becomes impossible to quantify it, leaving you without empathy or sympathy.
And if one incident of rape causes C-PTSD, then we cannot say that C-PTSD isn't as bad or that they shouldn't have C-PTSD because it was just one time.
The guy last night was consumed by being dismissed as "not as badly disabled" as others. He was fit, could run the Peachtree Road Race, ski, drink a beer, and hold down a job without being viewed as otherly abled. Then he then turned right around and assumed that my disabilities must not be that bad because I don't look chronically ill. I don't look traditionally disabled. My missing pieces aren't seen with the naked eye and can't be experienced by another person.
However, this ranking of issues persists. In 2021, Congress passed Senate Bill 1664, which updated the benefits for veterans to include C-PTSD as a reason to be granted benefits and to begin to earn financial assistance for specially trained C-PTSD dogs for veterans.
This was terrific news and certainly should have happened years before it did.
Those who suffer C-PTSD from trauma in childhood face an uphill battle in getting their C-PTSD recognized by the Social Security Administration as a disability. They also face this subtle, unwarranted attitude that they could get over it if they wanted to. If they don't, it is a matter of a lack of will, not something physically broken.
It is hard to demonstrate a broken brain.
You can't call upon a C-PTSD episode on command, and even if you could, cowering in the corner and protecting yourself from invisible blows and violations wouldn't satisfy those with this attitude.
It isn't just those suffering from C-PTSD that have difficulties. All psychiatric and neurodivergent persons suffer from this same dismissal of their trauma and disability. .
My dog Cas continues to train with me to be a help around my neurocardiogenic syncope and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). And he is a PTSD dog. His presence grounds me into the space I am in, not the nightmare spaces my brain still sends me to. He gives me courage when faced with much larger men. If I am shaking with fear, his mere presence allows me not to reveal that it may be as much from anxiety-induced C-PTSD as it is from my illnesses and genetic disorder.
I have long downplayed both my dog's C-PTSD training because I know it invalidates my disability. (Cass is my second service dog, and Alice was my first.)
Society is not ready to accept that 18 years of sexual, physical, mental, and emotional trauma has a lifetime effect that requires a Service Dog to be able to travel and function successfully in public. If society were ready, society would have to own the part it plays in the continued abuse and exploitation of children and the consequences those children face as adults.
And there is so much more. I could write a massive blog about masking among the disabled, the stigma of mental illnesses, looking healthy without being healthy, the lack of compassion for those with mental illnesses, public backlash against service dogs, having to work disabled, and the lack of medical care for the chronically ill..........
I chose to focus on ranking disability and trauma deliberately. This issue affects every abled body human who is not. Every mentally ill person with a psychiatric service dog who has to explain that the dog helps with a psychiatric disorder and then face backlash for not being "really" disabled. And live with the insinuation that mental disorders are less than a physical disability and chronic illness in the rank of severity.
If you look well and are disabled...if you are physically disabled and everyone sees it every day, you are valid in your occasional anger and frustration about a world not adequately prepared to deal with you - with us. Your feelings are valid if your disability is because of a missing arm, a broken brain, or fingers that have lost their ability to grip.
What the disabled community cannot do is turn on its own. We can't attempt to rank ourselves out of some need to justify our suffering. We must accept that everyone's disability is as valid as another. Especially if we ever hope society will accept our disabilities and illnesses, whatever they might be.
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