Even When We Sleep: Sleep Disturbances and CPTSD

This blog post is dedicated to one of the most commonly overlooked symptoms of Complex PTSD and PTSD; sleep disturbances. In 2013, after having reoccurring symptoms that mimicked narcolepsy, I completed my first sleep study. The study was quite an anxiety-producing experience. Sleeping in a new room with a stranger watching would put most people on high alert. There were also dozens of wires taped to every part of my body, including my face and in my nose. The next morning, when I discussed the results with the technician, she asked me what I thought was the average number of times a person wakes up during the night. I said 5, but she told me it was 9. She then revealed that I’d woken up 186 times and that I never entered REM sleep. Something was seriously off with my sleep.

Quality sleep is so essential for our mental health and overall well being. Only in our sleep can our bodies most efficiently perform the necessary work to keep us functioning at an optimal level. This includes regulating our blood pressure, blood sugar, hormones, immune system, moods, and emotions. Therefore, it’s so important to be mindful of how our experiences with trauma can have a lasting and unhealthy impact on our sleep.

Many things from my upbringing have contributed to my disorderly sleeping. One thing in particular that happened to me when I was 14 years old has stayed with me after all these years. I will describe the incident below for you in italics because I think it provides a clear example of why my body does not feel safe, even when I sleep. If reading about violence is triggering for you, skip the italicized paragraphs below:

After coming home drunk late one night and learning that I had not completely cleaned up a spill, my mom burst through my bedroom door and snatched me out of the bed by my hair (one of her favorite moves) and onto the floor. The whole thing was surreal because she usually reserved things like this for when we’re alone. I think she forgot someone else was there.

I tried to keep up with her, as she dragged me up our stairs and into our second den to clean up my spill. After she got tired of hitting and kicking me, she rubbed my face into the carpet while raining her usual shower of insults on me.

This scene plays over and over again in my head, sometimes like it happened last night. I can hear my bedroom door slam into the wall, her voice booming through me like lightning. I can smell the Canadian Club on her breath. Feel the naked sting of shame that washed over me when I caught a glimpse of my new friend’s terrified face as I was dragged out of my bedroom. That pit of dread radiating through my stomach as I scrubbed the carpet and thought to myself, this is the time, she’s not gonna stop hitting me this time. It’s all still there.

After this night, I retained the message that I must clean up every spill, but I wonder if this attack also cemented for my body that I would never be safe, not even in my own bed during a sleepover with a new friend? Sleep and school were the only places I felt safe from my mom, and now I only had school.

Even if you have not experienced sleep-related incidents, exposure to trauma(s) can have a lasting negative impact on your ability to achieve quality sleep. Common sleep issues associated with CPTSD and PTSD are insomnia (trouble falling and staying asleep), night terrors (screaming, yelling, and physical activity during sleep), vivid nightmares (sometimes flashback to traumatic experiences), and hypnagogic hallucinations (imagined sensations during sleep).

These issues are not exclusive to CPTSD and PTSD, but they can occur with these diagnoses. I’ve experienced them all. The most unsettling of them for me is the hypnagogic hallucinations, where I often feel that I am seeing and hearing things that are not there. It’s kind of embarrassing to share these issues, but I know I’m not alone and I believe that we don’t have to suffer through all of these things without support. So here goes…

During my senior year in high school, I experienced my first hallucination. I had been heavily medicated for my second major eye surgery. That same day, I woke up in the middle of the night to the loud sound of a human heart beating from my backpack. I still remember this as something that happened to me, not as a dream, it was so vivid.

Logically, there could not have been a beating heart in my backpack. How could it remain tucked away in my closet without dry ice? How could I hear the heart beating? Did it plug itself into a speaker? Ridiculous! Why would the heart wait to start beating so loudly until after I fell sound asleep, much like a toddler would? I know, impossible, yet I still have a memory of it happening to me, not merely dreaming about it.

After this incident, I started experiencing anxiety and irrational fears each night. I felt certain that someone was on my back steps and that they were lurking there to murder me. I was seventeen years old and living in a transitional housing apartment with my one year old son at the time. It got so intense at times that I had to sleep in my son’s room on the floor, but I chalked it up to watching scary movies.

After graduating high school and moving away to college, my hypnagogic hallucinations and irrational fears fully presented themselves. I moved nearly three hours away to campus housing. Apparently, the lurking stranger moved with us, except that I now felt his presence more than just at night. I felt it when I was alone in my home. I would drench the floor when I showered because I had to keep pulling the shower curtain back to check for him. Now that I am on the other side of this, it is slightly funny to think about my shower routine. It went something like this:

Step 1: Lock the door and put something in front of it so you can hear when (not if) the door opens. Everyone knows the credit card trick and these Dollar Tree doors in campus housing aren’t protecting anyone.

Step 2: Run the water. Turn it off. What was that? Ok, run the water…wait a minute turn it off…damn it Coko!

Step 3: Run the water and turn on the shower nozzle. Get in, you’re being ridiculous.

Step 4: Ok, maybe you’re right, quickly wash your face so that you can see if someone is coming in. Just keep your eyes closed, you can do this for a minute while the soap settles…what’s that? Ow, my eyes are burning! Damn it! Rinse off your face and check.

Step 5: Wash your armpits and check.

Step 6: Wash your breasts and check.

Step 7: Wash a butt cheek (my butt is too big to wash both at the same time) and… what was that?!

You can see how I ended up drenching the floor. I would also wash my body over and over again because I would lose track of what I was doing; you know, being interrupted repeatedly by the possibility of my imminent death. This eventually became an issue for being in the bathroom in general. I started to have irrational worries for the safety of my son when I was away from him. I began using the bathroom with the door open so that I could keep an eye on him and hear him at all times. There’s a rumor that I still do this and it is #fakenews.

As my anxiety increased, I started needing my boyfriend to hold me until I fell asleep at night. He would then slip out of the room and go back to his dorm room, only for me to call him back over because I was afraid. Eventually, as he couldn’t leave me for too long, he ended up living with me mostly. I never told him why I needed him there. I felt that he would think I was crazy. After some time, he officially moved in, which is when my night terrors began.

They began with me waking up in the middle of the night in heart-wrenching sobs. My first inclinations were fear and that something had happened to me. Why else would I be crying so hard and be so afraid? This startled my boyfriend and me. At first, I did not want him to touch me. I needed all the lights on, and I could not go back to sleep. Over time, we got used to me waking up crying, so I would curl up next to him while he patted my back and, in a sleepy fog, he would ask me if I was ok.

The next level of my night terrors was me waking up to my own screams. This scared the shit out of me and my boyfriend. Again, I wondered why I was screaming. I always felt like something had just been going on as I was coming to.

The final phase of this mess is when I started having hypnagogic hallucinations. I was 19 years old and did not know this term; I did not know they were hallucinations at all. I did not have a therapist or anyone I trusted to discuss my issues with, so I just suffered with it.

I started to see people when I woke up, either at night or in the morning, which caused more screaming. At least now I knew why I was screaming, right? The cherry on top is that it was mostly creepy men I was seeing in our room. Mysterious strangers, but not the images that pornography and advertising would have you believe are our secret fantasies. At this point, I finally accepted that I was crazy.

When I would wake up, the people in my room stared at me menacingly and would then fade away. It started happening so frequently that I decided to try looking at them and ascertain what they wanted from me. I fought off the urge to scream and instead let the terror freeze in my throat. I even wrote a crappy poem about it. I will spare you. Sometimes the figures would move around, pointing, laughing, crying, etc.

I had a staredown, upon waking up one night, with a creepy looking man. I sensed that he was actually not going to hurt me, although he looked very angry and menacing. It began to shift from strangers to people that I knew and loved. It was sometimes my little sister sitting on my bed, laughing and looking so beautiful. Other times, it was my big sister doing her daughter’s hair. Sometimes my friends or other family or acquaintances. Very often, my estranged adopted abusive mother visited me, in various moods. I decided that this must have been my unconscious brain processing my thoughts. I’d had a psychology class by now, so I accepted it and the visits became fewer, with longer breaks in between.

It wasn’t until I was in my early thirties and in my first full-time professional career that I got help for my irrational fears and anxiety. My family doctor at the time was basically like “girl get yourself together” and wrote a therapist’s name down. I was dealing with panic attacks that were affecting my blood pressure and I was a borderline diabetic. If you missed all the lusciousness in my photos let me break it to you now, I’m African American. I’m a Caramel Latte American. Ok fine, I’m honey beige, but Caramel Latte sounds better. I’m black ok? So everything in me cried out NO when my family doctor recommended therapy. In my mind, I heard “black women are strong, we don’t need therapy”, stuck on repeat. That’s how I’d been raised and that’s how my community had been raised. Thank goodness I got over that shit!

Devoting time to healing through therapy helped me break the generational cycle of abuse for my family. I felt so uncomfortable sharing all of these private and weird things about myself, but these were exactly the issues that were sitting with me, festering and spilling over into everyday interactions.

Through traditional talk therapy, EMDR, and some messy confrontations with my family, I was able to get my irrational fears and anxiety significantly under control. Of course, they returned when my mother passed away, as I wrote about in What’s Left Behind: Grieving The Death of An Estranged Abusive Parent. After her death, the irrational fears, night terrors, and hypnagogic hallucinations returned all at once. The difference is that I now have the tools to better manage them.

If anything about my story relates to experiences that you are having, please talk with a trusted physician or mental health professional. Show them this post if you can’t find the words; don’t suffer anymore. There are so many options and strategies available for managing anxiety, insomnia, and irrational fears, but it takes practice and openness. You deserve to feel safe, especially when you sleep.

Note: Managing your mental and physical health is a serious and important issue that should be pursued with trusted and competent healthcare professionals. I am not a healthcare professional. I am not a licensed or trained expert. I share my specific experiences and what has worked for me, in celebration of my growth and with the hope that you will find out what works for you.