I am on the way to hospital… again. I am experiencing severe chest pains. I probably should have called for the ambulance service. I chose to drive myself – this is an all too familiar trip for me. The nice thing is when you show up at hospital with chest pains, you get seen immediately. I get whisked to the back and hooked up to an EKG. It is normal. The doctor wants to rule out that I haven’t had a heart attack, so they draw my blood and check for an enzyme that is a tell tale sign of a heart attack. It comes back normal. No heart attack. I now feel guilty for wasting everyone’s time. There are actual sick people waiting to be seen. This is just my body doing it’s “thing” again. This is C-PTSD manifesting itself physically. There is nothing anyone in the hospital can do for me tonight.

I can’t count how many times I have been hooked up to an EKG due to chest pains. It is only recently that I have connected these pains to my childhood trauma. The first time I remember having chest pains was when I was probably around 11. My oldest brother had picked me up and thrown me across the room. I don’t remember why he was mad at me. At 11, I was still small enough to be thrown across a room. When I hit the floor, after bouncing off a wall, I was in excruciating pain. I couldn’t breath. It wasn’t just from having the breath knocked out of me, but it felt like something tore inside me. I had a stabbing pain in the chest. I assumed a muscle had been torn by the way he had thrown me across the room. Maybe it never healed right. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all…

I continued to have severe chest pains as a child. I never thought much of them. I assumed what my brother did to me never healed right – or it was just me growing. It would come and go. By the time I made it to secondary school (high school), the pain would hit so hard it was debilitating. There were times I would be driving and have to pull off the road and wait for the pain to stop. These pains have continued into my adult life and have never stopped.

I cannot connect any particular event to when the pains will hit. I am almost guaranteed to start having chest pains during particularly rough times. However, these pains will happen randomly at other times . It finally hit me that my C-PTSD and chest pains are connected together.

In the list of “Symptoms of complex PTSD” provided by the NHS, chest pains are one of the physical symptoms:

Symptoms of complex PTSD

The symptoms of complex PTSD are similar to symptoms of PTSD, but may include:

  • feelings of shame or guilt
  • difficulty controlling your emotions
  • periods of losing attention and concentration (dissociation)
  • physical symptoms, such as headaches, dizziness, chest pains and stomach aches
  • cutting yourself off from friends and family
  • relationship difficulties
  • destructive or risky behaviour, such as self-harm, alcohol misuse or drug abuse
  • suicidal thought

During therapy, my counselor had been constantly asking me to scan my body looking for some physical response to the EMDR. I never felt any different during these sessions and therefore never noticed any physical symptoms. I am like a rubber band wound tightly. At some point, you cannot wind any tighter. After that, the state becomes normal.

Since I have had chest pains for so long, I never connected the C-PTSD and chest pains together. I can never tell when the pain will hit. My body is in a constant state of fight-or-flight. Being in this state, my muscles remain tense – ready to either fight or take flight. This is my normal state. I think over time, being in this constant, tense state, I will eventually start having chest pains from the tension regardless of what stress is currently in my life. Events can strain to twist that wound up rubber band even tighter, which will cause even sharper pains. My move to the East Coast was a particularly stressful time. I began to have chest pains regularly as well as nausea and acid re-flux. My rubber-band was wrapped to almost breaking.

A negative to the EMDR is having to relive my trauma over and over again. I notice when I go back into EMDR, I am more likely to have chest pains during the week. At this point, I can absolutely connect my C-PTSD and chest pains together.

What can I do about this? I cannot retreat to my “safe place” that my previous therapist had me create. That place was shattered when my dog passed away. But there are other things I can do to try to decouple my C-PTSD and chest pains. I can do other visualization exercises, such as picturing a beautiful and calming place – maybe somewhere that I visited and found myself happy. I can do deep breathing or other other mindfulness exercises. I can go for a long run. The important thing is not to just “sit in it.” I cannot allow myself to simply accept the situation. I have to make sure I take care of myself – get exercise, eat right, and try my best to get good sleep. This may not completely stop these episodes, but they go a long way to help reduce the intensity and frequency of the chest pains. I believe one day my C-PTSD and chest pains will no longer be coupled together. One day they will both be a thing of the past.